There will be days that kick the crap out of us. Days that make us feel like hope is an antiquity and purpose is a mirage. Days that knock us down for the count. Accept this truth. Then accept the good news that follows this truth. Once we’re down there’s only one place to go…up! It doesn’t matter how fast we get up. It may take a while and be tedious. If we truly seek to be governed by reason, nothing can keep us down. For there is nothing reasonable about giving up. Perhaps what knocked us down in the first place was a swift dose of reality. The reality that we need to get up in order to move towards something new. Reason doesn’t condone stagnation, but it does tend to knock sense into us when we get the crap kicked out of us.
Category: Motivation
Confute
Confute means to “prove (a person or an assertion) to be wrong.” This action may be the core of what many would refer to as “drive.” Some of the most “successful” people the world has ever known have been driven to success in the effort to confute someone else’s opinion of them. Their desire to prove others wrong is like rocket fuel; it propels them to greatness. However, there is a serious flaw in the logic.
Think of doping in sports. The purpose of doping is performance enhancement. When people use performance enhancing drugs, they tend to outperform their competition. The problem first and foremost is that it’s cheating. Secondly, it has more negative health consequences over the long-term. There’s potential increased risk for heart attack, stroke, blood clots, higher cholesterol levels, hair loss, acne, an enlarged prostate and/or abnormal liver function.
When people are driven to prove others wrong, anger is the key ingredient to the fuel that’s driving them. It’s synthetic. It’s not a natural or organic process, and therefore the long-term consequences perhaps outweigh the benefits of the so-called success. If someone finds “greatness” but is unable to let go of the anger that got them to their destination, their success is only a perception. Perhaps it comes with fame and fortune, but when so much is determined by how others feel about us, and our desires to be perceived as “better than” or the “best” – is that really a recipe for contentment? No amount of glory is worth the emptiness of a vengeful spirit.
Opinions are like…
Everyone has opinions. It’s even popular opinion that we must have opinions on everything. If we were to tell someone we don’t hold an opinion on a given topic, they will then hold the opinion that we are ignorant, choosing apathy, or they will give us their opinion disguised as certainty. However, what could be more of an act of caring than reserving the formulation of an opinion? Why should choosing not to waste good energy on speculation be anything but the right thing to do? People living in the moment don’t have opinions about it because their energy is being used to live the truth in each moment.
Hypengiaphobia
The root of accountability comes from an Old French word acontable, which means “answerable” or literally, “liable to be called to account.” Acontaphobia is not a word, but it should be: the fear of accountability. Hypengiaphobia is the fear of responsibility, which is close enough.
Of all the fears we know, the fear of accountability is rarely discussed, but seems to be right up there on the leaderboard with Death and Public Speaking. Even more interesting is that people with a fear of accountability also tend to fear people who actively practice accountability. They spend a great deal of time and energy trying to irrationally rationalize their own resistance to accountability instead of working towards being more accountable. They often do so by referring to people that hold them accountable as being inflexible or worse intimidating. As lopsided as it may be, make no mistake – no amount of bullshit or lies will ever amount to a truth.
The War of Wanting War
Soldiers are trained for war – for active duty. They train to be put into the worst situations and do so selflessly in order to protect. Statistically, total strangers and ideas make up more than 99% for whom they are fighting. Such a small percentage is for their own families, friends and loved ones – the people they actually know personally. That’s heroic! In society, we are often fighting for ourselves and do so without much heroism. We are fighting to get more – more money, more status, more power, more material things. Yes, we do so to provide for those we know and love. However, we are constantly at war with this idea of what it means to be successful.
Such internal struggles blind us to the idea that we are really searching for peace. The peace of piece of mind. We fight so we can “relax” and “enjoy” life, but we rarely do so. We often rest only to regain the energy we need to fight another day. Life is complicated. Life is a struggle. But choosing war and wanting war for the sake of thinking it’s the only way to gain piece of mind is perhaps missing the mark of what it means to find peace. Peace is not achieved through war. War is the reaction to a reality without peace. There’s wisdom in choosing to not engage in warfare for the sake of validating an inability to be at peace. In these moments, may we learn to first question the core of our unrest.
The Balance in Teetering
Life is not lived on a Pass/Fail grading scale. However, many of us feel the need to end each day with such extreme weighted grades. The day was either success or failure. That’s absolute thinking and life is far more relative than absolute. That’s why the grading scale goes from A+ all the way down to F. Both success and failure have wiggle room. We also don’t often allow ourselves the luxury of marking periods; a duration of time to reflect back on a periods in our lives to gather up enough data to make informed decisions about how we are doing. Moreover, we often overlook the beauty of getting a C.
The slogan “Life is Good” really means to appreciate the notion that balance is what we need. Life’s grading scale: C is good, B is better, A is best, A+ is stellar, D is not great, E is worse, F is rock bottom. In reality, are our days either “stellar” or “rock bottom?” Likely not, yet we likely know people who devote their energy to such extremes. How draining it must be to live only knowing extreme highs and lows. There’s no balance. Life teeters! Teetering gives us perspective to know the difference between what we want to push ourselves towards, and what we want to move away from. That’s balance! When life is good, we have the energy to push for excellence. Energy comes from knowing the value of balance.
Have
What do we have to do today? Live and be where we are. That’s it! Everything else we experience is put upon us by our expectations and desires for outcomes to situations we cannot control. That informs how we feel about what’s happening. As we know, when how we feel is at the mercy of either what’s happened or what happens next, that doesn’t bode well for feeling good.
To be means to exist. It doesn’t mean thinking about how or why we exist. There is no suffering to existence, because there is no feeling. To feel is to be aware of our existence. Suffering comes from our devotion to how we feel about what’s already happened or fearing the worst about what hasn’t happened yet.
