Writing practice: write a one-sentence story
The difference between a human and an ant is the ant doesn’t have the capacity to evade the fact that it’s just like all the other ants.
[ok, that wasn’t a story. try again]
Perhaps there’d be less ennui if people had more of themselves to express.
[again, not a story. try again]
Jack thought he would feel small and inconsequential were he exiled to a distant, tiny, uninhabited island with no communication with the outside world, for there would be nobody to whom he could think he were superior.
[also not a story, but at least there’s a character and his thoughts. try again]
“With what magnetic forces have I been aligning psychologically,” Jack thought, “and who has benefitted?”
[ok, still not a story, just a thought. no change took place. try again]
There’s this process of chaos and alignment. Our emotions initially at rest though not necessarily aligned, are excited and put into a heightened and frazzled state. Then, a solution is offered to calm our emotions and align them in a way that soothes us psychologically. It’s like magnetizing an iron bar by repeated exposure to the aligning force of an external magnet – heat up the bar to excite and create the conditions by which alignment can take place, then expose it to the aligning magnetic field of the external magnet. Each time this happens, the iron bar becomes a bit more magnetized in an alignment with the external magnet. Perhaps the very difficult ideal is to be internally aligned so that no external force can create chaos and realignment.
And sometimes it’s pretty innocuous. Like making a wish when you throw a coin into a wishing well. The presence of the wishing well excites our emotions and focuses us on what’s possible, then throwing a coin and making a wish aligns us psychologically (focused thoughts and positive emotions such as optimism and expectation) with the thing desired.
Dantes allowed himself to focus his entire psychology first on rewarding his benefactors, but then on revenge. I haven’t gotten much through the revenge part yet, but it’s interesting to consider the implications of allowing oneself to be 100% aligned with something external like that.
So part of the challenge is to identify within oneself that which is most worthy of alignment, and then learning how to strengthen the alignment so that external forces can’t de- and re-magnetize us away from our inner value. That, I think, is one part of true inner strength.
Caesar was most threatened by the men who couldn’t be de- and re-magnetized. Those are the ones that pose the greatest threat to that type of man.
Caesar said, “Those men who don’t smile and bow when I pass – we must do something about them.”
[at least there’s action – he actually said something. still no change, but there’s a hint of a change and confrontation. almost a story, but still not quite]