"Silencing Those Hissing, Preening Doubts..."

In the best-known illustration of the Four of Cups, the blessings that were once novel and worthy of celebration seem to have lost their luster. It's a fundamentally human idiosyncracy that we each discover early in life and spend a lifetime trying to defeat: once a pleasure is easily attainable, we become far less satisfied with it, and will give it up easily in pursuit of some new thing.

Sometimes this leads to accumulating what's referred to as an "embarrassment of riches" which bring you little joy. Other times, you might move from one exciting experience to another, never settling down long enough to be nourished by them. I'm sure you're well familiar with that deep-seated feeling of restlessness and uneasiness -- it prevents any option from becoming apparent as the right one.

Dreaming up new and exciting conquests is sort of like dreaming up new and fantastic animals. On the page they're tantalizingly possible, but if they were ever to take shape and become real flesh and blood (and beaks, and feathers, and horns...) they'd fare pretty miserably. I've been very inspired by the cryptids that populate the paintings of Justin Gibbens, especially his birds. They seem like such hungry, noisy creatures -- you can see how the serpentine elegance of their necks would easily become a threshing snarl, how their ravenous beaks would be forever gnashing in search of food. They're cumbersome (and apparently flightless) creatures that have lost that essential "birdlike" quality, despite having more avian anatomy than ever before.

If you know the trick to silencing doubts and desires and enjoying things purely as they are, I'd sure love to learn it. If your dissatisfaction with the status quo is genuine, then it may be an impetus to pick up and take off in search of new adventures; if it's false, then you should have no problem settling down for a while and enjoying that hard-earned feeling of fullness for as long as it lasts. The more time you spend hovering in between, however, the less you'll be able to trust your own impressions on the subject. Activites that demand discipline and endurance, such as exercise or meditation, may turn out to be the key to silencing those hissing, preening doubts, one beak at a time. [Via]

Previously On Arcanalogue: The Four Of Cups