Project Management

Of what nature is the exercise of control over oneself? This is a bad way to start; it may be better to ask what hope there is of ever coming to better understand one's own efforts at self-direction. The wherewithal to exert restraint over oneself, however, is paradoxically the necessary condition for coming through time and experience to appreciate what does and does not contribute to a clearer understanding of the issue at hand. For without capacity to command oneself through time there can be no assurance that one will maintain the steadfastness of purpose necessary to submit one's way of thinking to continued scrutiny.

In the beginning, it is dissatisfaction that gives rise to the question of the nature of self-control. From here, there are many fruitless ways to proceed. What, for instance, is an appropriate scope for initial study? And what criteria are likely to be useful for discriminating between useful and useless lines of inquiry? Also, how might introspection about one's desired outcomes help illuminate the appropriateness of even beginning, and if so then with what commitment to continue, this project when one finds oneself always already involved in wholly distinct projects?

Experience tells me that the one sure way to remain stuck in this insidious chain of obtuseness is to continue to ask these questions without the benefit of other people's perspectives. There is something in the nature of dialogue, I seem to have found, that makes it very hard for two people to be stuck in the same way over the same thing. Such is some kind of progress, and yet something in me remains that motivates reflections such as this. The project is, as it has long been, in some sort of real, actual trouble.