A friend pointed out to me that I always have an objective. I’m always trying to accomplish something, reach a goal, or at least form one.

The idea of surrender and “letting go” is ubiquitous in self-help and religious literature. Unfortunately for someone like me, it’s easy to turn “letting go” into an aim or objective, yet another form to cling to.

I used to tie myself in knots around the paradox of seeking to be selfless for selfish reasons. This appears in a lot of popular Zen material as the problem of desiring to be without desire or the ego that seeks to be free from itself.

As a melancholic, I’m frustratingly, grindingly slow to learn lessons. In particular I struggle to generalise implicitly. I’m okay with “all X are Y”, but it takes many iterations of X before I realise “hey, it’s X!”

It’s been X all along, but like a person with amnesia, this new memory will not last for long. Even if I remember the conclusion, I’ll forget its true significance. I’ll remember what but not how. And before I know it, I’ll be back striving for some ill-defined goal.

Ultimately, goal-seeking is about feeling in control, and with that realisation I’m immediately tempted to dig at the roots of this love of control and see if I can’t put an end to it. But that would be another objective, and I’d disappear once again down the rabbit-hole.

So, appropriately, this post has no conclusion, no recommendation, no suggestion of how to solve the problem and, perhaps, no temptation to form another goal.