"Reconciling oneself to the fact that projects "take the time they take" can be a necessary step in finishing projects at all. My mind is not simply prone to distraction, it is prone to rebellion. The wrong kind of pressure makes it resist its own commands, sends it spinning out of its own control. Bearing down, reining in, whipping harder doesn't get "me" back on track so much as set me against myself in a showdown I always lose winning. Better to just glide on the thermal of whim until the destination once again comes into sight and a smooth approach becomes finally possible.

Not to say that one can drift one's way to success. Aims must be fixed and kept in mind, even if one knows it's worse than useless to charge right at them. One must develop a sense of one's attention as one develops a sense of a powerful but skittish horse, calmly riding wide of known dangers…

We need to reconcile ourselves to our own temperaments, stop trying to fight or drug ourselves into submission…"

"Chapter 12 of The Social Animal, “Freedom and Commitment,” contains Brooks’ attempt to draw on contemporary research in the psychological and social sciences to adjudicate between what he sees as two fundamentally incompatible forms of life: the life of freedom and the life of commitment. Brooks thinks happiness studies and other bodies of research vindicate the superiority of the life of commitment on empirical grounds. But Brooks’ grasp of the relevant research appears to be precarious and incomplete.

[…]

If Harold feels he needs more community, connection, and interpenetration, then he probably does (the “affective forecasting” literature notwithstanding.) But that doesn’t mean individualism, self-fulfillment, and personal liberation aren’t equally important. In my forthcoming post on freedom, autonomy, and happiness, I’ll show not only that Mark could end up having it damn good, but that freedom and commitment are false alternatives."

"When offered the chance to get out, to choose our own communities, to choose our own friends, to relate to our families on our own terms, to get out from under inherited obligations of status and obedience, many of us choose to get out. But this is not to eschew commitment. This is not to give up on happiness. Few of us can live happily wholly unencumbered by commitment. To know freedom from the life of the tribe is to demand more from our lovers and our friends because we have chosen them; they are really ours. The flip-side is that we owe more, too. It’s true that commitments of choice are more tenuous than commitments of fate… Some of us are very lucky and would freely affirm, again and again, the bonds we fell into as children, or at birth. But some of us, the weirdos especially, are less lucky and fall mostly into loneliness when young…" [via: http://ayjay.tumblr.com/post/4055442956/when-offered-the-chance-to-get-out-to-choose-our ]