the word "will"

If the reader is willing to put up with a bit of nonsense and narcissism, then I, William Beyer, shall write an essay that I hope you shall find at least somewhat interesting. Where to begin? Perhaps with a nickname since to a few, I am known as Will. As a derivative of my actual name, it’s about as simple as it gets, still, I cannot imagine any other nicknames share spelling with such a complex word. The Oxford English Dictionary turns it up as a noun verb and adverb in its simplest form, but also turns up as an adjective in the form of willed, as in, ill-willed. By far its most common form is as an auxiliary verb to describe an action that is going to take place in the future. Where is it in the text? Where isn’t it in any text? The word will appears four times on page 190 (chosen at random) of Kafka’s short stories. It’s the kind of word you use a hundred times a day, and by this repetition it is often taken for granted. In this form, will is also completely interchangeable with shall. These uses of the word are indeed function over form, serving their purposes admirably, but doing little else to add to the collective that they must be a part of.
Will is also a thing that one possesses, yet it is an odd force, difficult to define. Will can be described in one sense as what one wants. It can also be something that tells who gets what when you die, as in “last will and testament”, your final wishes. The willingness to do something relates not to ability, but to desirability. I could go on, but I’m not willing to do so. Perhaps most intriguing of all however, is the concept of willpower. I’ve never been quite sure what it is. On one hand, it seems to be the ability to resist or persist at something for an amount of time; a stubbornness quotient. Willpower also often appears as a stat in many of my favorite role playing games, usually related in some way to spell power. What is it then? How does one gain strength of will, even in the real world? Willpower can almost be made out to be a spiritual thing, how long and how far you’ll go to stand up in what you believe in might be a measure of willpower. Children deliberately disobey their parents to show willpower, perhaps even to explore its depths. Willpower is admitting when you are wrong, and holding out when you are right.
Now, if I may, I’d like to take a look at will in Kafka’s short story “In the Penal Colony” where the explorer is trying to remove the officer’s body from the apparatus. “And here, almost against his will, he had to look at the face of the corpse.” I find the notion of “almost against his will” very interesting; what does that mean? It is something that he needs to do, but doing so is not entirely against his will. Would he have looked even if he didn’t need to? I would say that it is true that our wants, our will, often get the better of us. This man is an explorer; his desires are to see the world and to see what few others have seen. It is entirely possible that he knows quite well the depths of his own willpower. How the rest of us come to know our own limits, is a bit of a mystery.
Semantic satiation is the notion that repeating a word over and over again causes it to lose all meaning and I think this notion has made this paper difficult. Is my will weakened or strengthened by continual use? I feel that here is a certain risk involved in an essay like this; that I might, to my detriment, avoid using the word in the next few days. I feel that have at least partially exhausted it, and so exhausted my will to write, hopefully that was the in some part the goal of the assignment.