Temptation

Introduction

Oscar Wilde (a favourite of mine) said

“I Can Resist Anything But Temptation”

And in my case that is definitely true, well almost always, although the first example will be of me resisting temptation.

Temptation and Me

I have a number of goals that I am working towards with my writing and one of these is to create a thousand stories and post them on Vocal. A normal Vocal story, be it fiction or an article requires six hundred words, but poetry requires only a hundred words so the implication is that if I stick to poems then I can hit that target fairly quickly but as you can see with the existence of this article I am not taking that route.

The other thing is that often poems can take a long time to write if you are using a defined format that includes rhyme, syllable count and other grammatical constructs and I usually do that, but I do the odd free-form one as well, but I do put a lot of effort into my poetry.

But this happened. Vocal has a short “High-Ku” challenge (just requiring a haiku poem which is seventeen syllables although that is a western definition of a true haiku which can take many forms) and Vocal, for this has removed even the hundred-word limit. So I have the opportunity to submit a lot of haikus (or is the plural still haiku? It does sound like one of those words that are both singular and plural, like sheep), but I resisted and submitted just two, one for my 888th Vocal story and the other about climbing Mount Fuji.

Yesterday I was listening to Jackie Wilson’s “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher“ written by Gary Jackson, Raynard Miner, and Carl Smith and realised that the lines below fitted a Haiku form.

Your Love Keeps Lifting

Me Higher and Higher Than

I’ve Ever Been Before

The last line has one syllable too many and they are not the exact lyrics, but I thought that is something I could put in the challenge. Then I said to myself that would be wrong because my whole entry would be someone else’s work (virtually), and felt that would be morally wrong.

I knew this would be allowed and I could argue that I had changed it but it would be blatant plagiarism to actually post those words as mine, so in this case I actually resisted temptation.

And it seems most of this is about me actually resisting temptation but most of the time I don’t.

When I Don’t Resist

I am fat, old, diabetic and have lots of things wrong with me but I still cannot resist chocolate and sweet things because they taste nice and actually give me a lift.

I don’t drink alcohol because it really causes me pain but when I can find it alcohol free Guinness is an absolute treat.

I am an absolute sucker for anything that lifts my spirits and makes me feel good even though I am told I should not partake in that particular thing. The thing is I don’t binge on things, I just have a maybe more than ample portion, and to offset that I do do a hell of a lot of walking, taking photographs (usually of cats) and that has actually improved my physique so much that when I got hit by cancer I was told by the consultant “Usually this is a really bad situation, talking probable end of life, but the state of your body means that we are probably OK to do anything to you” and they did. I am still recovering but my almost addiction to walking has really done me good and the temptation is more to go for a walk than to sit at home, so this form of temptation is probably doing me good.

Conclusion

Giving in to temptation is not always a bad thing, and after you have done it, if you still feel good then it is fine. If you feel regret then just try not to do it again.