Getting past self-indulgence for our own good.
Part I in a Series
By Ben Christensen
The frost of my exhalations punctuated the crisp, clear air on a late November day in the low-20s, (Fahrenheit), and the cold had robbed my iPhone battery of all its charge. The creek I had hiked through more than a foot of snow to find was only a short two miles over the low pass, winding along the floor of a beautiful mountain valley in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of southern Colorado. I found the creek covered with snow and ice, the only sign of its existence the unmistakable sound of running water.
Besides being stymied with my fly rod in hand and a daypack on my back for supplies, I was overweight, as the nicey-nice euphemism goes — by about 60 pounds — and unhealthy, with a daily tobacco habit and a reliance on processed, preservative-rich truck stop food. In short, as I sucked wind and glanced back up the valley wall to the pass, I knew what hard going I had to get back to my truck.
I was 40 years old. Something metaphysical came over me at that moment. To call it otherwise would render it an understatement. I very simply promised myself at that moment I would keep myself in better condition so I could get in and out of that particular mountain valley whenever I wanted to enjoy it, and that simple promise led me to a plane of happiness I did not know possible.
It wasn’t January, and I didn’t resolve to get lean, or to get six-pack abs, or to look a certain way, or even to whiten my teeth. I didn’t want to steel my body to run a marathon, or a half-marathon, or a 5K. I just made a vow to be light and limber enough, and healthy enough in heart and lungs, to walk in and out of that valley. And it was at that moment that I gradually began unlocking the gate to a pathway that led to more than healthful living — to overall personal and interpersonal well-being.
When people say they “made a vow,” they sometimes use the word flippantly, telling some big joke. But a vow is a solemn thing, so much more than a resolution. Its place in the human order is well-established. My son is a Carmelite hermit in a cloistered hermitage in the middle of nowhere (in West Texas, of all places), and he is in the process of making vows. I made a vow to the young man’s mother almost 25 years ago that I would stay by her side until I died. Because we exchanged vows that were metaphysical and beyond a mere understanding or arrangement, we are still together.
Like other, more solemn vows, my vow to my body and its place in those mountains came out of a virtue what Thomas Aquinas called prudentia. It’s a Latin word, of course, which is very useful because, as a dead language, the word’s meaning and connotations do not change. Prudentia means foresight. It was Aquinas’s first of four capital virtues expounded upon in his Summa Theologica. I heard Aquinas get hyped unfairly on a BBC World Service radio feature as being essentially a born-again Stoic. While his neo-Platonism successfully reconciled ancient Greek thought with Christian teaching, Aquinas’s virtues differ quite distinctly from Plato and Aristotle’s virtues because they serve different purposes. Unlike them (and philosophers are going to want to argue with me here, not because I’m wrong but because they want to argue), Aquinas believed that without foresight and perspective, the other virtues were pointless.
I’m like anyone else — I’ve dieted dozens of diets and started workout regimens and gym memberships that wasted my time and money. But it was this prudence (not nearly as good and useful a word as the static prudentia, I think you will agree) that caused me to want to first get my health straight, and then, once I had my health in order, caused me to consider other ways my overall wellness was being sabotaged — not by other people, but by the same self-indulgent tendencies and behaviors that had brought me to a place of poor health.
I believe words and phrases like “motivation,” “self-discipline,” “mental toughness,” and “stoic self-control” bear a tightening up and a re-examination, like so many other worn-out words and phrases in our wilting salad of language. So I’m not going to throw them around carelessly in this series.
Rather than get into the weeds with their origins and connotations, it should be pointed out all the aforementioned words and phrases pertain to what philosophers and theologians call our will, which is nothing more than our ability to tamp down a natural tendency within ourselves to self-indulgence.
This series is going to look at how people must employ logical reasoning to get their affairs straight, from their physical bodies to their relationships. I believe Aquinas had it right. Why even bother? If you want to get slim/better/faster for some callow or facile reason, you are unlikely to get or to stay there.
Human will is that mysterious thing — in fact the only thing — that suppresses self-indulgence, which runs rampant in people and societies even when entropy has not taken root and decadence is not so well advanced. But without understanding, the will is worthless, and the other checks to the enemies of well-being I will discuss in this series are likewise worthless.
What’s so bad about self-indulgence? God knows corporate-consumer culture tells us self-indulgence is a virtue, bundling it up disingenuously with self-care, the virtuous cousin of self-indulgence.
In the next installment I will explore self-indulgence and how it is our bitterest enemy on the way to wellness and autonomy.
Ben Christensen is a writer and former Marine who lives with his family in the Texas Hill Country, west of Austin. His website is www.riskaverserebel.com, and he can be reached at riskaverserebel@gmail.com.
