Discipline is the refining fire by which talent becomes ability

As always, on Thursday night the question gnaws at me..what are you posting about? the voices ask.. as i was falling into the land of nod i had a few idea yet of course now that i sit to put pen to paper..i have no blessed clue..

regardless, yesterday my extended family all took on a personal fast. A beloved member of the family is very ill, so in the zechut of his refuah shelaimah we fasted. It is an amazing thing. On a regular day,when i get hungry i must get food in me asap. I cannot concentrate. I cannot work. I get nauseous. In short, bad things happen so i make sure to get food. But on a fast day. it is different. Yes, i got hungry. But when food is not an option..you push past the hunger and do you do what you have to do anyway. Soon you get lost in your work and the hunger pains die away.

Mi'kamcha Yisrael. When it comes to my diet i am not so disciplined. The things that i want to eat but i shouldn't do not become non-options rather they become worse options yet at the same time still retaining their status as options. The only times when i really did well was when i actually mentally completely removed all that stuff as options. Only then did it work. But as long its a possibility..its a possibility ( profound i know). If i am walking by a McDonald's..no matter how hungry i may be, or how in the mood for fries i am..it is not an option. There is no internal struggle. I just walk by. I may comment on how good it smells (that's usually by a steak house not McD) or how hungry i am..but to actually walk in..NOT AN OPTION.

This leads to the obvious nekuda of your point of Bechira. R' Desller is famous for using this concept. We all have our points where we have our struggles. For a person who is recently becoming frum, the McD may be a real struggle. For a recovering alcoholic, whether or not to have that second beer is a conflict. Someone who has decided that movies are not for him, may be really tempted to zone out after a really hard day.

I think that the only way to make this thing no longer a temptation is to make it no longer an option. As free, diverse people who in our essence are bochrim (bochrim not bachurim just making that clear) we revel in the choices that modern society gives us. But as with any freedom, there lies the danger of it being abused. We have so many choices and we like the fact that we have these choices. But we do not always choose correctly.  We need to limit our choices to give focus and structure back to our lives. If everything is always an option then decorum and discipline go out the window.

So how do you focus yourself? How do we limit our own freedom to become the person that we want to be? Is it liberating or limiting to put restrictions on ourselves? Is the risk worth it?How do you decide what to limit and how?