Good Morning hungry minds! Happy Monday (or as such as possible). I hope you all had a great weekend and are ready to come into the week bright-eyed and bushy tailed. What a privilege it is to live to see this Monday!

Our menu this week is a good one. I was trying to think of what to write about this week because last week’s theme reached very high into the epistemological stratosphere. I don’t know about you, but for me last week’s thought breakfast menu was just very… filling. So we’re going to take this week to ground ourselves in some more practical ideas. More on this week’s menu below.

For our main course today (and this week, for that matter), we’ll be munching on Augustine’s famous contradiction (more on that below). On the side, we don’t have to reach very far, as our main course is paradoxical in nature. For dessert, we’ll take a passage from Augustine’s Confessions to root ourselves in context to go through the rest of the week. Today’s breakfast might taste the same over all three courses, but we’re just cleansing the palate. So have a seat, thought breakfast is served!

This week’s series surrounds St. Augustine’s Confessions. For those unaware, Confessions is Augustine’s autobiographical journey towards God. It is written as a prayer, but is rooted in Aristotle’s logic and the mysticism of Neo-Platonism; two schools that existed long before the Catholic Church.

Although rendered as personal dialogue with God, Confessions describes a problem that faces every person on this earth. That problem is the battle between consciousness and will, compulsion and desire. We know what’s good for us, but our will does not align immediately. For example, we know that healthy food and exercise are undoubtedly good things for our body, but not everyone who knows that eats healthy and exercises. So this week, we’ll reach into the acceptance of morality with help from one of history’s great guides. We’ve loaded this plate up quite a bit already, so let’s keep today’s portion light.

Augustine says in Book VIII of Confessions what might be the most human sentence ever written: “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.”

This is the quintessential moral dilemma. The original “I’ll start Monday” moment. These words traveled over 1,700 years into your thought breakfast because they address universal concerns for humans. The idea is not just sin, but its about procrastination, temptation, and our relationship with self-control. Further, it highlights the feeling of wanting to delay what we know we must do.

I believe we delay action towards these ideals not because we don’t want whats good, but because we don’t want loss. The path to health means losing some time and energy in the gym. The path to temperance means losing something you might find fun. Whether its skipping the gym, having bad habits, putting off a difficult conversation, or doomscrolling for hours… we all—at some point or another—trade our long-term freedom for short-term relief.

When I think of this idea, I think of cognitive dissonance—holding two conflicting beliefs. It’s not that, though. You may not even believe it’s actually better to start later, but you act like you do. Modern psychology calls this temporal discounting—our tendency to overvalue the comfort of now at the expense of something better in the future. Augustine called it his own thing, the divided will.

Everyone around you has a “not yet.” Everyone, at some point, stands in that space between intention and action. The first step isn’t to move, but to notice… because awareness itself begins to loosen the chain.

Today’s reflection is already a paradox in motion, so there’s no need to bring another into the equation. Augustine’s struggle itself is the paradox we’ll explore today:

We delay our own freedom in pursuit of comfort.

We crave liberation from our habits that bind us; from attachment, distraction, or guilt. Yet we decide to postpone the actions that would indeed set us free. We don’t do this because the chains stop us, the problem is that the chains have become comfortable. The chains are familiar. Whether they’re good or bad, moving along would make us lose these precious chains. But freedom, by contrast, is quite unfamiliar. Freedom demands change, which can be scary and uncertain.

That’s why we inherit Augustine’s prayer for transformation without immediacy. We say “set me free but not yet” not as a matter of hypocrisy, but a way to disguise our fear as logic.

Augustine’s paradox is that his pleasure is the source of his pain. He calls it his divided will because part of him is drawn towards God while the other part is chained to his habits. The comfort of sin is the very thing that keeps him restless.

Now it’s time that you taste some of Augustine’s words for yourself. I gave you the idea, but reading his words will help you see his humanity. St. Augustine says in Confessions VIII.10-11:

“The new will which had begun in me to will freely to worship you and to enjoy you, O God, the only sure delight, was not yet able to overcome my former will made strong by the long course of habit. Thus two wills were fighting within me, the old and the new, the carnal and the spiritual; and in their conflict they tore my soul apart.”

“Thus I came to understand from my own experience what I had read, that ‘the flesh lusts against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh.’ In truth, these were my two wills, one old and one new, one carnal and one spiritual, which were in conflict and consumed my soul.”

This passage is when Augustine fully and clearly admits that he is not lacking in his belief in God, but in his alignment with God’s will. It’s not that he feels he’s failed, but he recognizes it has a human faculty standing between him and God. He knows exactly how he should be, but what he has to give up (habits of lust, comfort, and recognition of ego) stands in the way.

This leads directly into where we’ll take it tomorrow. We’ve hammered down on the acceptance of this truth that humans have a faculty within us that, against our will, hesitates in the face of growth. What does it take for the divided will to become whole?

After Augustine accepts his inner division, he begins to understand it can be reconciled. Today’s thought breakfast helped us understand the “not yet” part, but tomorrow we’ll move onto the “finally now” step.

What do you keep saying ”not yet” to? When even is “yet”?

Munch on that for today. Notice what you’re postponing; not from laziness but from fear of loss. That’s where transformation quietly begins.

You ought to thank your friend/colleague/parent/forwarder because they’ve blessed your inbox with something special. Every day we will upload more thought-provoking content that will ignite your day with a sense of mindfulness and thoughtfulness.

Remember to stay mindful, smell the flowers, and take it easy.

Chef Ricky - Thought Breakfast

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