Spiritual exercises?

We've all heard the term "spiritual exercises, but last night or the night before I suddenly had an idea that helped me understand what they really must be.  It's something I remembered from when I was a kid.

To back up, then ....  When I was young – eight, nine, ten, eleven, around there – every so often I would find myself thinking of very sad things as I fell asleep at night.  Hang on, that doesn't begin to explain what I'm trying to say.  Let me try again.  It's more like there were these story-lines that I would make up in my head, really elaborate fantasies that went on and on, and I would tell myself these stories as I went to sleep.  (To be strictly accurate, back then I was telling myself story-lines of this kind most of the day too.)  Some of them were melancholy – melodramatic – maudlin – to the point where I would quite literally cry myself to sleep.  And yet you have to remember I was living a safe, secure, middle-class life in the suburbs of a safe, secure city.  I didn't have any relatives die during that time, no catastrophes befell the family, there was nothing external to provoke such anguish.  It was more the sheer love of the story itself.  I would indulge in these stories the way some people love tragedy, or horror movies.  There was something pleasurable, in a lurid, squalid, debauched kind of way, in the heavily overdone tragic fantasies I would tell myself.  And of course they were all completely self-centered: one of them was about imagining myself having died, and then imagining how inconsolably wretched everyone else would (naturally!) be at my death.  The others were similar.  That is to say, they would have been terrible as literature and I could never have told them to anybody else.  But so long as fantasies aren't expected to be any more than a guilty pleasure that pander to deep and unspeakable desires, they filled the bill just fine.

In retrospect maybe this was all a symptom of my later depression, showing up early.  I didn't have a name for it then.  But in any event one of these story-lines was a fantasy that I had somehow been dragged before a tribunal of some kind and they were making public all the secrets I had tried to keep from the world all my life.  You know that privacy has always been a big deal for me.  See, for example, any of my posts about my relationship with my dad over the years.  So this particular story-line struck me hard, and was good for a whole night of weeping until I drifted off to sleep.

But over the years something interesting happened.  The story began to lose its hold on me.  Specifically, I began to fantasize myself standing up to the tribunal (heroically, of course) to tell them, in effect,

So what? You've collected all of these secrets of mine and you are publishing them to the world, somehow using them to accuse me of something. But there's nothing in here that you couldn't say about everybody else in the world, too. Here I was weak or unethical? There I was sexually aroused over the wrong person? Somewhere else I was cruel or petty or spiteful or just plain mean? I'm sure I was. And I'm sure that each of you judges have had times in your life when you were just as weak or unethical or spiteful or inappropriate. And the same goes for the audience, too, who are all listening and being shocked at how bad I am. It's all true of you too, or something just like it.

What's the result?  Well it didn't make my relationship with my chronically-prying father any better.  But over the very long haul – years and years – it helped me finally to desensitize myself to that stimulus, just a bit.  It helped me to relax and stop clinging to my privacy quite as compulsively.  And that has been a good thing.

At some level I suppose I knew this all along ... at any rate I lived through it so I probably had some awareness of the progress over time.  But it wasn't until just one or two nights ago that I realized: Those fantasies functioned like a spiritual exercise.  They weren't as focussed as a true exercise would have been, because I wasn't using them for a purpose.  I got way too much depraved pleasure out of them for that.  But even so, they moved me in a direction where something that had been a big deal became less of one.  It was progress.  And so I think in a sense they count.  It's an interesting thought.

I'm offline as I write this, or I'd look up my post about when Ender spoke the death of Marcão and link to it here.  I'm talking about the same kind of freedom.