When you retire, you wage battles with institutions, time, younger generations, health, and “old age,” but your biggest challenge is yourself. This is the old you that has always plagued you, now acclimating to the fact that, like it or not, your remaining years have been gamified by actuarial tables. The longer you live, the longer your family receives a revenue stream. This strange condition threatens to turn the old you into an even more intense version of yourself.
In my case, the old me is a worrywart, an obsessive, a malcontent, and a neurotic. Now the final chapters of my life have been gamified, and I fear what this worrying, malcontented self might become. I cannot change him through an act of will. I have to pay attention to him.
This is the theme of Meghan O’Gieblyn’s memoir Will and Attention. In the book’s opening pages, she quotes a sentence from Simone Weil that she keeps on an index card above her desk: “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.”
O’Gieblyn has had ample opportunity to examine the failures of will in her long struggle with alcoholism. She writes that she nearly drank herself to death in her twenties, got sober for more than a decade, and then started drinking again, even while giving AA talks and dispensing a wisdom that could not save her. One of the things that confounds her about the relapse is that during her years of sobriety she was happy. Why give up happiness? To complicate matters further, when her relapse was exposed and she told her AA friends all the right things about needing to do the work and not taking life for granted, the pieties sounded false. Reflecting on that period, she writes, “I can see now that it was a problem of authority. I had lost the privilege of narrative distance. I no longer had an ‘old life’ and a ‘new life’; I had only this muddle of my own making.”
As I reflect on O’Gieblyn’s words, much of her torment seems to come from living in a state of chaos. Having an old life and a new life creates a clean, well-ordered trajectory that appeals to us. But what if the lines become blurred? What if life becomes a mishmash of conflict and ambivalence as we vacillate between our worse and better impulses?
O’Gieblyn could not will herself off alcohol. At the same time, she observes, she could not will herself to become a Catholic. Having rejected the fundamentalism of her family, she hungered for a return to religion, this time through Catholicism. But this failure dovetailed with her return to alcohol and represented, she writes, “a larger pattern of regression” that defied her intellectual understanding of the dangers of losing one’s spiritual anchoring. “I know a lot of things in theory,” she writes, “and none of it seems to be of much help in the trenches of everyday life.”
She had written a book about losing her fundamentalist faith while seeking a path toward Catholicism by meeting with a priest and attending Mass. She comes to see both her return to alcoholism and her attraction to institutionalized religion as forms of self-sabotage. In both cases, she is seeking oblivion, a way of losing herself to forces greater than herself. Intellectually, she sees the danger, but emotionally she remains compelled. She must therefore confront compulsion versus will. Did she really choose to return to alcohol or to the certainty of religion? Did she even understand what the words will and choice meant?
Then she encounters Weil’s argument that we fail to cure ourselves through will but may succeed through attention. The sentence hits her hard, arriving “as the signature of truth, the conviction that you are learning for the first time something you have always known.” But it takes her a long time to grasp what Weil means. At first, she understands only the failure of will because repeated failure has made that part painfully obvious.
Her book becomes, in large part, a refutation of the will. If human agency exists, the will does not necessarily unlock it. Indeed, the more meaningful the endeavor, the more likely brute effort is to fail us. “The most important things in life completely elude the will,” O’Gieblyn writes. Effort alone cannot summon happiness, piety, faith, seduction, love, productivity, or genius. It is especially futile in the face of addiction. Nor can you simply will yourself into a life of faith, which makes me think of Paul’s admonition to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”
Part of the problem is that the will is an unreliable bedfellow. Is it even pure in its intentions? Do we really want the things the will supposedly guides us toward? O’Gieblyn thinks otherwise. She describes herself as a divided soul whose actions reveal that she does not necessarily want what she tells herself she wants. “My will is scattered, directed toward many contradictory things, and easily distracted.” The will is therefore an untrustworthy character, one Paul warned us about in his famous Epistle to the Romans.
If the will fails us, what then of attention? What does it mean to apply Weil’s words to our lives? What would it mean to put the will in the back seat and let attention drive?
First, we have to understand what the will is. Nietzsche believed “that the illusion of willpower rests on our tendency to identify with the part of our soul who commands, not the part who obeys.” But O’Gieblyn observes a contradiction that complicates the idea further. “On one hand,” she writes, “the will is desire (both will and volition come from root words meaning ‘wish’ or ‘desire’). On the other hand, the will is necessary only when you need to act against your desires, or overcome them.” The will therefore “both wants and wants not to want.” To cheat on your diet is not simply a lack of will but an excess of conflicting wills. “The person who breaks his diet wishes for things at once: to eat and to refrain.”
Her argument is powerful, persuasive, and liberating, almost Pauline in its cogency. No wonder the will fails us. It is a contradictory beast. Its right hand doesn’t know what its left hand is doing. The will is therefore a bad companion. We should stop the car and toss it onto the curb.
Now that the will is gone, we need a replacement. That replacement is attention. But learning to pay attention to what matters is not a skill acquired overnight. We may first have to unlearn habits accumulated over decades before we can even begin. That unlearning may prove every bit as arduous as the learning that follows. Both will require focus, engagement, and the very faculty we are trying to cultivate: attention.
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