Committing to staying awake

A promise is a promise. I get that, yet I've always been ambivalent about commitment. Even though people who are slapdash about their promises annoy me. Sometimes the game is not worth the candle.

Along with concepts like "discipline" or "honesty", "commitment" is a slippery customer. Too little is clearly a bad thing, but too much can be as well: discipline can slip into self-punishment, honesty into cruelty, and commitment can become absurd rigidity.

I have known people who will cause themselves illness or injury helping with a task because they said they would. I have known colleagues who drag themselves out of bed with the flu in order to come to work - where they will achieve little beyond spreading the germs. If you're too sick to do your job, please, stay home. It applies in social situations too.

Have you ever entertained exhausted guests? People who are clearly not well enough and/or awake enough to be out and about, and who nonetheless make a valiant effort to be cheerful and sociable but who, you suspect, are only here because they promised. Your generosity, the gift of your hospitality, has become a penance for such guests. You are - however unintentionally - torturing them, and they are abusing your hospitality by turning it into a penance, even if they are abusing it in a socially acceptable fashion.

How far can you go? The 7 Habits chap tells a story about making a new year's resolution not to drink soft drinks. He included orange juice in that category. It was a really hard promise to keep, partly because he loves orange juice, but also because it became awkward when he was out because sometimes there wasn't anything he could drink. Sometimes he would be very thirsty. He stuck to it because a promise is a promise. He was very relieved when the next New Year rolled around, and learned to be more careful in what he promised in future.

Its a fun story, and I find his determination and perserverence quite admirable, and also quite silly. I think the real moral of the story is pride. I think he was too proud to admit that his promise was a stupid, pointless promise and that he should release himself from it. I think he could have learned not to make unreasonable promises after maybe a week or a fortnight. After that, what was the point, really?

We should be thoughtful and realistic when making promises, but we should also be thoughtful and realistic about keeping them too. A promise is a process we commit to in order to attain a particular outcome. If it doesn't serve the outcome, we should review it. A promise is no excuse for acting on auto-pilot.

This is post 8 of 100 posts in 100 days.