WILL IT

November 21st, 2018

Occasionally, during particularly dramatic parts of movies, or even books, we will witness a character who is so full of confidence, and often anger, and self-assured ability, they will declare some kind of divine influence over events.  They’ll say something ridiculous like,

“I will it to happen.”

As though they are endowed with such an intimate tie to the core of reality that their mere thoughts seem to have an effect on the way things go.

Of course, the word ‘will’ as discussed in a previous episode of Tinkered Thinking, Episode 184, entitled ‘Will Power’, will derives from a much less impressive sounding word.  Will comes from wish.

Imagine for a moment swapping out that powerful-sounding line ‘I will it’, with  I wish.

Generally, when we say, ‘I wish’, is when we are being pessimistically facetious about something we’d love to see happen but feel certain will never materialize.

The attitudes of each situation match the connotations perfectly, and yet – etymologically speaking – both words derive from the same meaning.

What else might we say about these two diametrically opposed attitudes?  The first one who is full of fire in the movies, gritting teeth and saying “I will it to happen!”.  Would we call such a posture… lazy?

Certainly not.  Such a person is practically on fire with drive, while the person who swings a limp hand at the non-possibility of some better reality and says “I wish”…. how would we characterize such a person?  Would we say that such an attitude has the same amount of drive as the first?  Certainly not.  The second is an attitude marked my stagnation.

There’s simply no forward momentum with such a person, just a sense of being dragged through time.

These two attitudes or postures towards the things we can dream up indicate how we view the source of change for reality.  One of them is external, meaning, when we merely wish for something to happen, we expect it to happen for us.  But when we will something into existence.  That posture is placing the responsibility square on our own shoulders to figure out how to make it happen.

Instead of making a wish and tossing a coin into a fountain, we’d do best to realize there are two sides to the coin we wish upon.  We can have a nice thought about a possible future and toss that possibility to the whims of fate as we toss a coin into that fountain.  Or we can flip that coin, and realize there is another way to wish.  We can will something into existence.

But the posture here is different.  There is no leaving things to the whims of fate.  There is drive, there is determination, there is energy, all of which contribute to our ability to work towards something.

We can realize that we do not simply will things into existence like some magical genie.

We will things into existence by working them into existence.  By working with reality, pulling the levers of reality, rearranging it’s parts, sculpting them, deconstructing them, repairing them, until what we had the will and wish to see happen, is done.

This episode references Episode 184: Will Power.