tommiekelly
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All the Small Things
🕑 Added 2024-02-27 10:42:27 +0000 UTCHello, good people of the internet, and welcome back to the third post in the Redux Series here on Patreon, where I go back to my old blog posts from the AIWW site and see if I still align with them or if I have anything to add or subtract from them. Maybe at the end I'll put it altogether as a book collection, or maybe I won't. Time will tell, I guess.
This one is from 22nd March 2015 and was written for the AIWW Blog proper rather than the defunct Frater Blue Tumblr blog. It's a post about not letting all the minor annoyances in your day build up so that they become a huge problem that drains you of your magic and creative energy.
One of the things that really jumps out at me when I re-read old blogs is that too much of the content still resonates with me as “ongoing concerns”, which would imply that I'm not really learning my lessons from all this. And that's fun.
My life feels like I am just moving in and out of the same patterns over and over. Each time I feel I have a better grip on what is going on, but then I read my diary or a blog post from a few years previous and realise that I had the answer I am looking for years ago and someone forgot to apply it.
But to be fair to myself, I have practised what I preached in this blog for the last few years — for the most part. I don't argue with people online anywhere near as much as I used to. It's utterly pointless. And to a large extent so is arguing with people in real life too.
But there are many other minor annoyances that I allow to build daily, that I am in the process of working on lessening their impact on me.
I edited this blog more than previous ones as there were quite a few mistakes, but also I really didn't like the tone of the piece. There was a lot of anger and self-righteousness in it, and a fair dose of condescension. Perhaps if you read the original version you would see what I mean, but perhaps not. I know it's there, though.
My other complaint about this post is that it focuses the entire blame on the individual and doesn't recognise that the environment & culture have a huge impact too. As does the daily grind of just staying alive. Having to be constantly productive all the time in order to survive is probably more of a factor in falling prey to the Demon Fatigue than arguing online.
Or maybe, like this posts, all this is just a reflection of where my head is right now.
Probably.
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ALL THE SMALL THINGS
I feel that I, and therefore I can assume that this is equally true of at least some of you, sometimes look too much at the big picture and forget that it is all made up from smaller, less fancy images.
It’s wood for the tress territory, really.
As Magicians, we tend to think more in grand, big picture, widescreen extravaganza terms more than the microscopical building blocks of our day-to-day lives. But As Above IS So Below and personally, I think it’s time for me to work on the below bit, for a bit.
I was originally attracted to the occult because I was looking for the Big Knowledge, the Big Secret, Big Powers or Big Whatever, and because of that, I sometimes let the small, but important things, slide. Seeing the Magic of the Universe revealed by the Gods before my very eyes is a worthy goal, but so is the goal of not being a totally exhausted zombie by 8pm.
This is probably all better explained with an example.
If you have been reading my other posts (and why not?) then you will know that I have taken a slight Left-Hand-Path route at the minute (well, to be fair, I was always kinda LHP in a lot of areas I just recently decided to actively follow it as a path in a sort of belief shifting exercise) and I have just finished going through the first three levels of a LHP School’s Correspondence Course material*.
Now, first off an apology, I illegally downloaded this material and I went ahead with the reading of the higher levels even though I didn’t have the qualifying initiations. SO, I know I am not getting as much out of this material as I would have if I did it correctly.
I know this, because as a member of B.O.T.A I understand how the weekly lessons work differently than just reading through all the available information. The PDFs of the first 3 years of B.O.T.A are freely available on torrent sites, but I guarantee that if you download them and read through them, you will not learn anywhere near as much as doing them weekly, paying for membership and doing the exams. You just won’t. Until I did it the Right Way, I didn't understand the difference.
Having said all that, and bringing this ramble back on point, there was a part of the lessons that stuck out to me. I almost feel bad now writing this, as I feel like the terribly bold adept who is revealing inside secrets that he should not be privy to**. But, it’s not quite like that. I have heard this “secret” many times, in many places, it’s just that this current incarnation of the information seemed to resonate with me a lot more.
The course talks about Fatigue and why it is such a deadly enemy to be slain. The more you let yourself be burdened by the mundane, the less energy, or power, you have available to you for your magic work.
But what does this mean in practicality? Well, we return to the small things again. It’s the small things that build up and over the course of the day become this huge Fatigue Demon that makes us not want to do anything other than sit in front of Netflix all evening***. It’s the Demon Fatigue that takes all your energy and makes you convince yourself that actually, no, tomorrow is a much better time to do that Sigil. I could list more examples, but I am sure you all get the idea.
The small things comprise many things.
A small thing is responding to that stupid Facebook comment to show the poster that they are wrong, or to defend yourself online from someone who you don’t know or, in actuality, care about. It’s getting annoyed because someone is serving you slower than you want them to. It’s getting annoyed because you split a small amount of coffee on some paper. It’s the sound of the vacuum cleaner.
All these things add together to become a strong force, but none of them having any real power on their own. By the end of the day you have had so many small annoyances and becoming a wave that you have no energy for anything else, but the kicker is, you probably don’t know why you are so tired.
SO, my new Big Magic is to slay the small things at their birth. Stop wasting bits of me on unworthy paths. Next time I feel I want to write that “clever” rebuttal online, I'll think of where it is leading and just not bother. Thinking of the power you are giving away. I'll think about whether the situation I responding to is worth the magic and creative energy I will lose.
The Demon Fatigue is powerful, and his army of Small Things is Legion. But he can be slain.
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2024 NOTES
*Dragon Rouge, for those wanting to know. I ended up joining it proper at a later stage and frankly didn't have a great time. At that time, you had to give feedback in a “closed” forum in the members area on the DR website, and some of the private stuff I posted there ended up being said to me on Facebook. Also, to even become a member, I had to engage a PayPal dispute with the transaction of my paying my fees before they would respond to me. Then when I sent my writing course work for Module 1 I never got a response in any shape or form.
** it's very cringy for me to see just how much I was impressed by very simple things back then. In this and other previous posts, it's amazing to see just how easily impressed I was by standard ideas.
*** Funny, I would now see having to sit in front of Netflix all evening as something that would requite a tremendous amount of energy, rather than something to zone out to. Even the process of trying to find something to watch is too much effort.
