NO, I DON'T WANT TO

"No, I don't want to." I've been thinking about how often that's my first response to just about anything. No, I don't want to work. No, I don't want to go to that party. No, I don't want to wash those dishes. No, I don't want to leave the house. It's not all the time and I'm much better than I was, but I suppose I'll go to my grave - of course, I'll go to the grave, saying no, I don't want to. That last one doesn't count.
     Over the years, I've come at this No from many different angles. It's fear and insecurity, my fear that the world won't welcome me - and this even though I can objectively see the world has, by and large, been a welcoming place. My NO is rebelliousness - I won't do what you expect of me, what everyone else has to do. It's laziness - I'm lazy and for reasons I will never fathom I just can't get motivated.  The NO is my emotional anorexia, my willful and compulsive choice to not do all the things that would nourish me - to deny myself the pleasure of work, a clean house, the energizing stimulation of everything the world has to offer. Each of these angles has given me useful information and sometimes has seemed like the answer to it all. But over time I've learned that none of them are or ever will be the key that will open my way to a new self, the one who never says a self-destructive NO, the one who is utterly changed. Any change is a slow and steady accumulation of many insights, it requires patience, and I've learned to value the bits and pieces of forward movement, instead of riding right over them, robbing myself any satisfaction simply  because they haven't  brought instant and total transformation.
     If I believed in miracles, I'd say it's a miracle that I got on to myself in the first place. But somewhere along the line, in another very slow process, I became able to look at the truth inside me. I constantly assessed my actions, thought and feelings, but those assessments grew out of the kind of inhibiting self-consciousness that comes from feeling there's a camera watching my every move and the eyes behind it see that everything I do is somehow wrong. But here was a new kind of watching and in it I suspended all labels of right or wrong. Whatever I saw was only neutral information, not the revelation of a truth that doomed me. If my reflex reaction was it feel it as doom, I could pause, step back and tell myself it was information I needed if I was ever going to change. I had to know the place I was starting from. I had to take the risk.
     How did I learn there's space between "me" and what "I" think? When did I see for myself the truth of what Viktor Frankl said, that I always have the freedom to choose my attitude? Well, that's part of a longer story and comes back to my favorite subject - the ability we all have to see ourselves from many angles and perspectives. It's an ability human consciousness gives us, our consciousness which is folded over and over again and, like the dough of a delicate pastry, has layer upon layers. Some of them are known to us, some are only hinted at, while others are beyond our awareness. William James said the mind is like a bird in its flights and perchings. The flights take place beyond our conscious mind; what we are aware of are the perchings, the specific landings of conscious thought. But all of it is part of the flow, the stream of consciousness. 
     His great phrase. Not mine.