Or not. Advice— even our own, can roll out with a certain simplicity. Four-four time—a basic techno predicability. Especially those instances we intuit already the thing to be done. What’s right.
Somewhere deep in Matthew, the Son of God informs that moving forward, the law shall be written on the heart. That we come with a conscience, in other words. Yet somehow I seem given to even other words. And to worse thoughts. Thoughts of leveling scales in ways I never considered on the streets.
Advice urges not to nurture compromising thoughts. Like of comic book vigilantism masquerading as a viable balancing act. Advice declares that problems aren’t “problems” if we don’t dwell on them. Advice goes on to say that acting out betrays an intrinsic mistrust of the “process”— as though the universe is not self-leveling after all. That it requires our knee-jerk reaction to it to help it along. Or some conniving, despite our peephole perspective into its operations.
Before flailing, advice advises we just we just “take a beat” — not a beating, but count to something. And on the worst days, advice shines like a streetlamp on a sunny day, lighting the thing we see just fine. The thing we veer the car into anyway.
What makes our own advice good enough to take—better than Alexa’s or some gray-haired friend? And when we know what to do but aren’t ready to do it, does our incarceration lend more to getting over the hump or to giving up? | JC