Consistency

"The hobgoblin of little minds"

Consistency is the hallmark of the unimaginative

—said Oscar Wilde, apparently, and I ponder his words as I fold my laundry for the eight hundredth time, before having my breakfast of oats and fruit, as I have done for the past eighteen thousand days or so. Of course he would say that, wouldn’t he, the old pretentious dandy, one of those unbearably self-centred intellectuals who mistake their literary talent for personal virtue and consider their mind basically a cultural treasure—so unique and so precious that it should be indulged in every possible way at the expense of every body, including their own. How could you ever constrain the genius with something so pedestrian as consistency, God forbid! Doing the same thing every day is for the small-minded who can barely be considered human: their tiny little minds can bear the drudgery of discipline, they not like us, our minds were meant to soar on the wings of imagination and absinthe.

I mean, he probably didn’t even say that, you know you can’t trust quotes on the Internet, but I bet you he thought it at some point. I know because I understand Oscar Wilde, I was raised by his intellectual descendants.

Fig. 1. The sun also rises.

Although, if he did say it, perhaps he wasn’t totally wrong, perhaps I’m being unfair. After all, I’d be the first to admit that my imagination is not at all well-developed, and if I’m completely frank, it verges on non-existent—to an extent that almost puts me on the autism spectrum, according to reputable online tests. I mean it, I do not understand the hype that imagination gets. I cannot fathom the appeal of fantasy (both the pastime and the literary genre), science-fiction bores me to death, and you better believe that I’d rather stare at the ceiling for two hours straight than spend that time daydreaming (let alone watching Lord of the Rings.) I barely even night-dream, to be honest, a fact that was dismissed for years by haters claiming that “you always dream, you just can’t remember your dreams,” until I got my Garmin, which now confidently proclaims every morning with great fanfare: NOT ENOUGH REM.

(Nyah-nyah, haters.)

So maybe that’s it—with no imagination and little talent in most areas that I’m interested in, the only thing I really have going for me is consistency, the old hobgoblin; and so I cling on to it like a lost child, knowing that it’s the only force that can get me anywhere. All that my simple mind can comprehend is the Here and Now, and the Here and Now is too tiny to do anything meaningful with it. For poor unimaginative souls like me, we must toil every day without the slightest idea where we’re going, and it takes years and years of daily consistency to see a result.

But if I’ve learnt one thing from this grind it’s that the result is always a surprise and never, ever what I’d have imagined in my wildest dreams, if I had them. So here’s my question to you, Oscar Wilde, how do you go about accomplishing things that you cannot imagine? Or are you content to limit your goals and plans to what you can already achieve in your head? Are you happy to confine your future to the four walls of your finite mind?

Fig. 2. And the sun sets.

Although, let me say that if consistency is so stupid, you’d really expect it to be a bit easier. It’s not easy at all, as it turns out, because the mind always thinks it knows better, it always wants to do new things, go with the flow. But here’s the thing about the flow: the flow doesn’t care about you. The waves of luck are random, silly, capricious, they will rock your little lifeboat in a million directions, with no concern for whether you ever arrive anywhere. The flow is equally fine with taking you to India as it is with throwing you to the sharks on the way. And anyway, the flow simply means always doing what your mind feels like doing—and you know your mind: it comes up with all sorts of nonsense all the time. If you commit to your mind, you will never be able to commit to anything else. If you truly commit to your mind, chances are you will die of youth and madness; or, best case scenario, old age and madness.

Because if there’s one thing that the human mind is not, it’s consistent.

In the end, the best of the best did not die from youth and madness, they sat down at their desk every day to work, they went for daily walks, cooked rice for dinner, and answered the phone calls from their mother. The best of the best swept the floor every morning and washed the dishes every night; they chopped wood and carried water, never concerning themselves with the hallucinations of their imagination. And that’s how they achieved the unimaginable.

The sun also rises

and the sun sets

then rushes back around to rise again.

If it’s good for the sun, it’s good enough for me.

PS. The quote from the subtitle is, supposedly, by Ralph Waldo Emerson—not quite sure how he imagines self-reliance without consistency, sounds pretty self-contradictory to me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

PS2. But you know words, he probably meant something else altogether.