Brain Food #781: How many of my wants
The perils of the Satrapy
Thoughts of the day
I often come across similar ideas in unrelated schools of thought or disciplines, a powerful reminder that the human condition is universal, and that our ailments are not as different from those of the person sitting opposite us in the café or next to us on a plane.
The Satrapy by C.P. Cavafy is a poem about letting our choices be directed by what is socially perceived as right and good, making the safer choices, and thus carrying a sense of spiritual resignation that comes with accepting “these things that you do not want.”
In some ways, it is about our limiting beliefs, of wanting one thing yet pursuing another, even unknowingly. As Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
So a question to try and answer this week could be: ‘How many of my wants are not actually mine?’
After all, though we may be similar in our troubles, we are all unique in our abilities, talents, and interests. That is why the world has (and needs) artists and scientists, lawyers and therapists, doctors and historians - as long as they all chose their path themselves.
The Satrapy
What a misfortune, although you are made
for fine and great works
this unjust fate of yours always
denies you encouragement and success;
that base customs should block you;
and pettiness and indifference.
And how terrible the day when you yield
(the day when you give up and yield),
and you leave on foot for Susa,
and you go to the monarch Artaxerxes
who favorably places you in his court,
and offers you satrapies and the like.
And you accept them with despair
these things that you do not want.
Your soul seeks other things, weeps for other things;
the praise of the public and the Sophists,
the hard-won and inestimable Well Done;
the Agora, the Theater, and the Laurels.
How can Artaxerxes give you these,
where will you find these in a satrapy;
and what life can you live without these.
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