Stuart Davis: Study for “Something on the 8 Ball” (1953)

"…I'll get to rediscover, for the umpteenth time, this self-same tactic for creating lasting change…"

When my inquiry into Decency began to dissatisfy me, I instinctively knew just what to do. That this was precisely what I always do when following my instincts reliably failed to inform me that this strategy had never once worked for long. Oh, it worked well enough in the moment. I shoved myself through to whatever stood in for the other side of that particular difficulty, like always, though it failed to address any underlying issues. Heck, it failed to acknowledge that any underlying issues might even be present. It took it on face value that the difficulty was probably no more than face deep and reacted as if it was just a flesh wound, a superficial complaint.

How did I respond? I put my head down and shoved my way through to completion that morning. As usual, that action propelled forward momentum, but it was motion featuring plenty of friction. The following morning, a little more effort was required. A week later, my efforts were reliably creating sparks. Still managing to nudge me through to a fresh completion, but with ever-increasing dissatisfaction. This tactic must have been learned early because it’s essentially preconscious. I am never even aware of making the decision to invoke this technique. It’s automatic. It works to the extent that it resolves a blockage, though it rarely, if ever, affects the cause.

The source of my dissatisfaction grew even stronger under this tactic, like it always has, and that’s where my automatic invocation of it so often turns tragic. It seems like magic in the moment it first propels me beyond a blockage. Later, it exhausts me as it appears to increase gravity’s insidious influence on the proceedings. My dissatisfaction transforms itself into a kind of depression through my repeated invocation of a technique never intended to satisfy me, but only to push me past a stall. On the other side of straightforward dissatisfaction lies a universe of unexplored possibilities. I usually choose to wallow in the dissatisfaction instead, leaving it untreated while I repeatedly attempt to shove my way past.

I usually discover, once I’ve almost thoroughly exhausted myself, that the cure for such a state has always been simple, nearly as simple as shoving my way through another spate of it. The apparent blockage to forward momentum represents a choice point—an often-unwanted opportunity to do something different or to do the same old thing differently. DoingSomethingDifferent might be as close to a universal prescription for treating incipient depression as I’ve ever found. It usually seems, though, that I need to apply some more forceful increase in dedication instead. Simply DoingSomethingDifferent seems too simple to be profound. This might be why this suggestion tends to come only after relatively lengthy bouts of shoving wear me down. It’s not until I’m more thoroughly exhausted that I can ever see the logic in my simply DoingSomethingDifferent.

This something need not be anything significant. Quite the opposite. Strategies that call for wholesale changes rarely persist long enough to change anything, perhaps because the protagonist is already exhausted when it finally occurs to them to stop doing something that has been failing them. A tiny intrusion might work best then, a shift that barely qualifies as anything at all. This might not even be something physical, but rather something psychological. Heck, “just” a change in attitude might prove adequate. Think small.

I am not offering advice to anyone but myself here. I am clearly not qualified to prescribe for myself most of the time, for I’m the physician who seems to need to fail before stumbling upon a strategy that works. I remain a hesitant learner. I am capable of learning, however, though I seem to be much less capable of retaining whatever it was that I thought I was learning. Next time dissatisfaction haunts me, I’m pretty much guaranteed to address the difficulty by attempting to bull my way through to some imagined other side that never exists. This tactic will seem successful until it doesn’t, at which time I’ll get to rediscover, for the umpteenth time, this self-same tactic for creating lasting change: DoingSomething (Anything!). Different.

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Tags: #Decency, #PureSchmaltz