Completion and Reward

Today I heard David Nichtern comment on how we put off the closing or completion of things, and referred to it, if I understood correctly, as a form of intellectual laziness. One example he threw out was James Cameron’s Avatar which he considered a film that could’ve been considered great in its singular completeness, and considered it essentially ruined by the fact that it was left open for continued production of sequels. Having myself just now learned that there are three more movies planned after the sequel that’s already just come out (to less than stellar reviews by my friends who are into seeing movies) I think I can see where he’s coming from that. I think that the four or five books scattered about my house with thirty or so pages left to go could very easily be considered evidence of intellectual laziness as well, perhaps even the same kind that inclines us to leave open conversations that could be closed and followed by silence, or the kind that inclines us to feel so good about doing one thing that we rush into the next in a seemingly infinite chain of doing, or the kind that causes us to revive a decade-old film franchise for four impossibly expensive sequels. Rather than allowing things to arise and pass away as they inevitably do naturally, we are constantly reviving them; the laziness here is that this process is easy to fall into, and captivates us without any real effort. To recognize the things around us falling away all the time (even the falling away of those things!) takes an interesting vigilance; it’s a direction of attention and a mental maintenance that are unusual to a lot of people. Different cognitive exercises in psychotherapy and branches of the mindfulness movements of the modern day seem to try to target this experience.

I would like to consider the default state of being as one of completeness. By default, there isn’t something ongoing for which we are waiting to finish. I consider being quiet and in a state of mental solitude to be a wonderful example of this: saying nothing already, there is nothing to say; being only the state of your own consciousness, there is nothing imminent to do. Constantly I find myself reviving constructions of myself even through simple things, like a seemingly harmless observational joke. These come to me mentally first, and often without any prior thought I echo them out into the world; at some point, there was probably a reward circuit of sorts built in me where I was validated for this (whenever someone would refer to me as “quick” when I was young, I wore it like a badge of my mental acuity) but now the vestiges of that within my personality are simply lazy attempts to revive an identity as “one who is mentally quick” when I don’t even have a conscious desire to be recognized as such. I can feel myself trying to prove that sort of thing to those around me at points and wind up sitting back in a later, more conscious moment wondering why on earth I would be doing that. These tiny lapses in embrasure of what is, sometimes (often not) followed by a recognition of the case at hand, are a sinkhole for energy. We throw ourselves into them mentally and physically, making something of what could be left complete. I think there is an innate reward in the state of completeness that exists without, prior to, and around these instances; I wonder what sort of reward-focused patterns I can build around that.