OH, THE HYPOCRISY

I just wrote a whole blog about why Mondays aren't so terrible. When I read it back to myself, I shook my head shamefully. It was so sanctimonious! How did I get so unbelievably pompous? I asked myself.

I was trying to point out that Mondays aren't so bad, it just depends on your attitude - and there are ways to cultivate good attitudes to nettlesome problems, many of which seem to accumulate of course, on a Monday morning. I believe this - I think we sometimes project trouble onto Monday that we've created ourselves (often on Friday afternoons). Well anyway, Woe is me. After all, this morning I felt like I woke up here in the office! I must have got here somehow in a somnambulent boobag - yet I'm quite happy to tell you what to do to avoid grumpiness, and in a pretentious fashion which I'm not following in any way at all, it seems.

Woe indeed.

How do you guard against this thing called hypocrisy? I feel sometimes like I could do with a kind of alarm that beeps into life when I'm getting close. Quite probably most of my friends and family would get fed up with it going off. I once had a keyring that you could whistle at if you lost your keys. It lasted a week before I had to take the batteries out.

Maybe a nudge in the ribs then. "You do that," it would say, knowing somehow that the advice I'm dishing out as though I'm some sort of pez dispenser, is exactly what I need to hear myself. I reckon some people have that already. It sounds useful. And annoying.

Here's how I think it happens. Our condition, our human condition, makes it ridiculously easy to see our own faults reflected in other people; to see, you'll note, but not necessarily recognise - our brain switches off that possibility somehow. However, something in the subconscious knows that we do know the answer to our own misery and therefore, uniquely have what it takes to help out our fellow sufferer.

Weird then, that a kind of subconscious altruism might actually be a factor in the hypocrisy build-up. It is though. 

But you can't be a patient and a doctor at the same time! Your mind has to resolve on one identity or the other. The most logical method of self-preservation is to deflect attention from your own shame and apply yourself to solving the other person's. That way your subconscious wins and so does the other person.

Another factor might be to do with obsession. Have you heard stories of big televangelists and preachers who stand on massive stages in front of massive Americans, railing about the exact thing they're secretly doing themselves? How did that happen? I've always thought that leading that kind of double life must be like being ripped apart from the inside. Perhaps in some cases, it was a subconscious attempt to deflect attention from their own struggles. Perhaps it was just too much time spent thinking about that thing - thoughts lead to desires, desires lead to fruit, says the book of James... I think. Though, it might have been Yoda.

That can work both ways though. You can get good fruit from good thinking. Perhaps that's it for me. Perhaps I need to think a bit better, a bit more often.

And probably go to bed earlier on Sunday nights.