There's interesting paradox that has really bothered me over the last year or so. Whenever temptation is particularly strong, and I am particularly "weak," and temptation seems to be pulling out all its big guns on me, I'm much more able to withstand it and come out strong on the other end. But whenever temptation isn't particularly strong, or even particularly tempting, more of a vague, floating, half-baked idea that doesn't even seem to interest me much, and I'm not even feeling drawn to it.. I almost always end up completely annihilated.
This puzzled me. I used to say that the level of attack always was directly related to my willpower to fight it - if it was a massive operation, for some reason I always pulled equally massive amounts of willpower out of God knows where and usually made it out the other end. The lower level attacks, the ones that didn't bank on desire so much as boredom or lethargy, barely even showed a gun before I threw mine down.
I think that my consciousness just doesn't go into high alert for those more covert operations. When I'm bored and when temptation is a steady, gentle, constant knocking, I don't even realize I've gotten up before I've opened the door. Or sometimes it does go into alert, but the problem is that I'm impervious to it because of that same lethargy -it's not that I want whatever particular temptation is being sold to me, but I don't want to resist, either. It's a supreme boredom with the argument itself. If I could, I'd ignore both my conscience AND temptation and just shut the door and go to sleep. Unfortunately, conscience can be ignored, but temptation can only either be fought or succumbed to.
A Kierkegaardian moment - every sin has it's root in boredom.
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