I watched the movie the Last Samurai the other day. It was interesting.
I think it utterly absurd that the main character lives at the end but
other than that I enjoyed the movie.
Now there was one thing in the movie, one line actually, that was
interesting enough to inspire me to write about it here. It was the
description of the people in the village as being a people who devote
every moment to perfection in whatever it is that they choose to
do. This intrigues me because it seems so overwhelmingly far from
the way the world is now. Seeking perfection is not only not necessary
in your daily lives, doing so can often be a hindrance. Instead we seem
to be a people who split our attention many ways and partake in things
just a little here and there to gain enough knowledge to appear
knowledgible. It’s an unbalanced scenario. Dedication is not
praised enough nor sought enough nor necessary enough for people to
engage in those acts that build it. As a result discipline and devotion
decline and people feel lost. We end up just doing without seeming to
improve, without getting better and then we wonder why we were doing in
the first place. Worst, we end up focusing on external scales that are
simple to perceive such as the scale of wealth or that of property or
popularity. These we can understand fully and we can judge ourselves in
this way so as not to really care if we have not increased our skill in
any particular area.
This is truly sad because our transformation into a multiple
experience, multiple exposure society need not lead to a society where
we value external scales over personal excellence. The ability to
single minded focus on perfection in a single activity needs to be
developed certainly. If you cannot make yourself focus precisely on one
thing your potential for self growth will be lessened. But at the same
time your ability to take in a lot of varied inputs, parse them and
assign attention efficiently to each one is a highly valuable talent as
well. True human excellence would require the discipline of mind to be
able to do both and when necessary choose to what degree to use both
approaches. A mind that can be both flexible and direct; the ability to
be both disciplined and open. This is what we should strive for.
It is hard though. We feel the impending flow of time upon us. We look
around in this wondrous world and see so much that we can and want to
accomplish and we find it hard or impossible to make the hard
decisions, to focus our attention on this set of things and no others.
We see in every choice we make the loss of the other choices. One day
we are paralyzed with indecision, the next day we look back at the last
and spend half the day lamenting the lost time do to paralysis.
It is trap that is hard to rise above. It almost feels sometimes that
your thoughts are your enemy. The more you contemplate what might be,
what you wish to be, and what you might do to make it be, the less time
you spend actually being, doing, and improving yourself.
When you look at it analytically it seems easy. First spend an adequate
amount of time deciding what you will do. Then devote yourself to doing
it without second guessing your decision. But the mind just doesn’t let
it be that easy. There’s just too much to lose. Life is short. We feel
the weight of bad decisions potential and realized weighing us
down. How do we choose to act anyway? But learning to do so is the only
way to excel.
But is excellence really a thing worth seeking? It has been sought
since ancient times even when the understanding of the idea was
primitive at best. But that doesn’t mean it matters. We can strive to
be better and better, greater and greater, but in the end we still face
the same fate. What is excellence for then? Survival? Respect? Maybe
just self-respect… But if you can detach your mind and care for
none of these things? What then? Maybe then your better off just
sleeping.
