I am thirty years old, and have still never learned how to overcome myself.
It reduces me to a creature of habit, a creature of immediacy; one without purpose or duration.
Overcoming is the delaying of tiredness when the vessel of the body begs for rest; repudiation when the puny cry of hunger demands attention; ignorance when the weak left calf says that it is no longer capable of running.
I give into this petulance as an incompetent parent submits to a toddler, cursing angrily and resignedly even at the very moment of my defeat.
To overcome is to rise above this background noise; to persist - with whatever it might be - in a state of adversity.
The body is the enemy of the body, the enemy of doing anything all. It promotes going to bed late, getting up late, and filling the space in between with an infinity of impulse-decisions. Eat this, unlearn that, procrastinate now.
Only when the whole of this vast boulder is unrolled from the self, allowing its substance to slam against the impossible and the unknowable.... only then is the pitiful sliver of the self apprehended.
And even upon the apprehension, we dangle precariously an inch from its event horizon, waiting to be sucked back in again.
