Time, Obligation, and the Unbounded Thing

I am a man who likes the shape of things.

I like to know where I am going, what is being asked of me, and how long the claim upon me is likely to endure. I like to measure a burden before I lift it. I like to see the walls of a thing before I enter it. There is nothing shameful in this. Reason itself is an ordering power. To prefer order is not weakness.

But preference becomes bondage when it hardens into demand.

I suffer not only when my time is taken, but when it is taken without clear boundary. I suffer when the plan I had made is bent out of shape by the needs, whims, or uncertainties of the world. I suffer when I have already laid claim in my mind to the coming hours, only to find that reality has not recognized my ownership.

This is the point at which I must look plainly at myself.

The vexation I feel is not always born of injustice. Often it is born of thwarted authorship. I had already written the next few hours in my mind, and I resent having the script revised. I tell myself that I am defending my time. Sometimes this is true. But often I am defending something subtler and less noble: my wish to proceed uninterrupted, unquestioned, and unaltered.

This I must examine without mercy and without self-hatred.

For what do I truly own?

I do not own the unfolding of the day.

I do not own the conduct of others.

I do not own the certainty of duration.

I do not own the clean edges I would prefer every obligation to have.

What I own is narrower and greater than all of these.

I own my assent.

I own my bearing.

I own the spirit in which I meet what comes.

I own whether I become small and petulant when reality declines to arrange itself for my convenience.

If I give my word today, then I must remember: what I promise today may bind me tomorrow. And when tomorrow comes, that bond is not an invasion. It is the arrival of my own prior choice. It is not theft. It is consequence.

Let it bind me gladly, or not at all.

If I accompany another, and the outing strays beyond the neat borders I had hoped for, then the test is not whether I can preserve the afternoon exactly as I imagined it. The test is whether I can remain master of myself when the thing becomes shapeless. It is easy to be composed within the measured thing. It is harder, and more worthy, to remain composed within the unbounded thing.

For perhaps that is my true vexation: not merely lost time, but time without known limit. Not the burden alone, but the fog around it. My mind wishes to grasp the whole shape of the claim before consenting to bear it. Yet life often presents claims without clear edge, and other people do not always move through the world as though it were a timetable.

Then let me ask: am I entering every errand as though it were only a task to be completed? Am I forgetting that, for another, the same errand may also be shared life, shared presence, shared wandering beneath an ordinary sky? Am I measuring only the cost, and not the company?

If so, then I am not wrong to prefer order. But I am wrong to make peace dependent upon it.

The free man is not the man who is never interrupted.

The free man is the man who cannot be inwardly disordered by interruption.

The sovereign Will is not the Will that gets its schedule obeyed by the world.

It is the Will that remains upright when the world declines to obey.

Let me therefore learn this:

To prefer boundaries without requiring them.

To prefer clarity without worshipping it.

To endure the shapeless without sulking.

To meet obligation without inward complaint.

To stop treating uncertainty as injury.

To remember that a thing need not be well-bounded to be well-borne.

If I cannot bear an open-ended inconvenience without resentment, then my peace is too cheaply taken, and I am too easily separated from it. If I must know the exact dimensions of every claim before I can meet it with grace, then I am still dependent on conditions, still bargaining with reality, still asking life to be tidier than it has ever promised to be.

This I reject.

I will not demand that the world present itself in the form I find most comfortable before I agree to comport myself with dignity. I will not confuse my preference for order with a right to uninterrupted authorship. I will not call every unwelcome alteration an injustice.

I will remember:

My time is not desecrated merely because it is used differently than I intended.

My Will is not overthrown merely because it must adapt.

My dignity is not harmed by waiting, wandering, or uncertainty.

Nothing essential is taken from me unless I surrender command of myself.

So let me be the sort of man who can say, with honesty:

I had other plans, yes.

I would have preferred a cleaner shape to the day, yes.

I would rather have known the cost beforehand, yes.

But this claim is here now, and I shall bear it without pettiness.

I shall not become small because the hour has become vague.

I shall not become mean because the road has lengthened.

I shall not dishonor my own word by resenting the weight of it.

Let what I have promised bind me gladly.

Let what I have chosen be borne cleanly.

Let me prefer order, but answer to reality.

Let me keep my peace, even in the unbounded thing.

And if tonight I find that I am not yet such a man, then let me at least be honest enough to see it clearly.

For that too is according to nature.

And it is from truth, not comfort, that mastery begins.

— Dr. Stephen D. Jones

Quod hodie promittis, cras te obligare potest. Libenter te obliget, aut omnino non.

What you promise today may bind you tomorrow. Let it bind you gladly, or not at all.

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