Personality Patterns of Action and Reflection

I've joked with my friends before that all life is is a cycle of boredom and despair, and then we all die (a bit of a play on what a friend once told me was one of Schopenhauer's ideas, though I have no idea if that's true).

Today I thought about what the primary patterns of my life, of my personality would be. I came up with the following list:

1. Frenzied activity. I'm running out of time to do what's important, so I'd better get busy.
2. I'll be dust soon anyway, so why work so hard and why not enjoy the ride?
3. A numbing, apathetic melancholic malaise.

...And it repeats from #1.

I'm fine with the first two, but the third isn't so nice. It's not the prettiest part of my personality and one I don't usually talk about, but I've resolved to be more honest in 2016, so I might as well bring it up now.

What's interesting to me is that the first two parts of the cycle are essentially different reactions to the same idea: that life is short and we'll all die soon anyway, and a generation or two after that no one will even remember us, really. 

When I thought about this post, it didn't seem as macabre as it does now that it's written down.

Anyway, I suppose what I'm curious about is how the first two patterns can be integrated to provide more psychic harmony. While skipping the depressiveness.

I suppose in a way it's normal to have cycles of action and relaxation, action and reflection in one's life. To what extent should we try and direct these opposing states, versus letting them direct us? It seems to me that the key is in somehow rising above this control/acceptance paradigm, and I'm not exactly sure what that would look like.

I can only think of Rilke's advice in Letters to a Young Poet:
"...Be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue. Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given to you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer, one distant day in the future."

In the meantime, I'll keep acting and reflecting the best I can.

Happy New Year,
Dillon Dakota Carroll