cause and effect, attitudes, and "I-ness"

[from Daybook © Anne Truitt, 1982, p47-48:]

The lives we lead appear, on logical examination, to result from the inexorable operation of cause and effect.  The point at which we seem able to bring our modicum of will is on our own attitudes, which then manifest themselves in the way we handle events.  By our means we can try to tailor our ends.  In the interval between event and responsive action, attitude acts like the chemicals in the nerve synapse, mediating the quality of the response.  I try to work on my attitude toward what happens.  In order to do this I find I must attempt to keep a distance, a position from which to examine my experience.  For me, the key to this distance is the memory of how I was when I was very young.  From this pure feeling of "I-ness," my life appears in retrospect to have been structured by a process of acquisition.  I learned and retained and organized a set of facades appropriate to various occasions.  When I encountered Gurdjieff's definition of personality as a compendium of many "I's", as distinct from the pure feeling of "I" with which we are born, which he calls "essence," I recognized its validity in my own experience.

[As people who know me will agree, i enjoy writers with an introspective bent—and especially with an interest in the philosophy of "I-ness" and such!  But i'm also glad that the self-analytical habit drops away most of the time and i'm free to actually live.

(And a side note:  I've decided to post only on weekdays; weekends are my days off.  Thank you for understanding.)

Enjoy the rain, peeps in the U.S. northeast; celebrate that we get a break from the dreary August doldrums.]