How often, when you meet your friends, do you find yourself tense in the shoulders? How often do you find yourself talking over the person next to you before they’ve finished their points? How often do you feel anxious? Perhaps the true mark of friendship is the removal of the mask. It is the ability to sit in silence, comfortably, without the need to fill the empty spaces.
There is a undercurrent to these interactions; a buzz. Best to listen to it to see if you’re in the right room.
At some point, after being secured in, and after the ride begins to grind forward, you begin climbing and climbing. Your body clenches, and your brain fires and fires. You perceive what’s coming, even if this is the first time you’ve gotten on this ride. At the top, a pause, and then, plummeting and plummeting. At some point along the ascent, you are giddy, because you recognize that you have lost all control of your surroundings and what comes next. The exhilarating part is the part where you part your arms up on the way down. It is in the surrender that you feel most present; alive.
Often misunderstood as good or bad, fear is hardwired and primal to our species. We do not “get past” fear, as if it’s a marker in the sand, outside of us. We, ourselves, dictate where and what fear is. When we “push past” fear, all we’re doing is moving that marker in ourselves. When we give a speech in front of a large group, skydive, quit our jobs, marry someone, or cross a busy street, what we’re doing is redefining where the marker is, or if there really is any reason for a marker at all. We are ecstatic when we do a thing we’re fearful of, because a small, quiet part inside us realizes it was never supposed to be there to begin with. We reassess what our minds are capable of, and we feel agency over our own thoughts. Fear allows you this victory. This clarity of control. This is why we “embrace” fear; we grant ourselves the understanding that we have more power than we ever thought possible.
The focus on chasing happiness, often at all costs, disguises the ability to find contentment right where you are. Right now. We believe (we are told to believe) that happiness is somewhere else. Far, but not too far. Perceptible but slightly out of reach. To find it, one must chase it. But contentment, silent contentment, meets us right where we are. It tells us to slow down. To receive. To acknowledge the beauty of the present. That it asks us only to sit still for a moment is the very reason we want nothing to do with it. We disavow it because of its availability. Instead, we scamper about. Living in the future while forgetting the present. We should re-calibrate.
For generations, civilization had no choice but to swim in risk. It would injure and kill and also propel. Scientific discoveries, full throat-ed capitalism; it was and is a part of a DNA. What do you lose when you spend most of your time eliminating risk? To over analyze each decision is to swim breathlessly to the shores of safety, wherever that is. When you spend all of your time de-risking, you attempt to control the uncontrollable future, rather than riding it. You stymie your own inner compass; you retard growth embedded in your very DNA. Instead of de-risking decision making, one would do better by just closing their eyes and taking steps forward. And then another. And then another.
How do wolves sense prey from miles and miles away? How do birds know where to fly when the weather cools? There is an undercurrent of knowledge that sits below consciousness. We grant it a mystical quality because it’s not immediately available to us. It sits latent, in equilibrium. It’s sand through our fingers but sand nevertheless. When we manifest something, we suspect it’s something like a witch’s brew, but really it’s been there all along. We strip, instead of add. We focus and eliminate doubt, freeing it to surface. It’s quite impossible to accurately describe or predict, but tell me you doubt it’s there. You don’t. You somehow know. Feeling is enough.
We often set goals without exploring why they are our goals in the first place. “My goal is to buy a huge house” is a common one, though one can desire this huge house because of some other, deeper desire, having nothing to do with the house itself. You may want a huge house because it’s a clear sign to an insecure younger self that they’ve become successful, and thereby they matter to people that paid them no attention. “I want to run a marathon” may be a goal that results from only feeling like your true self when you strain what you believe you’re capable of. A fear of sitting still. A fear of death.
To distill the true nature of goal setting, ask yourself why. Why is this my goal? When you answer that question, ask why again, and finally a third time. Get as deep as you can. Understand the reasoning behind the goal, and understand yourself much more in the process.
Using the external to fill the internal never works because you cannot feed feelings. “More” silences the ego for a moment, but it quickly returns to ask why you don’t have more, and why you’re not good enough to get it. Comparing yourself to others fills you with shame, instead of gleeful abundance.
Instead, we must ask ourselves what it is we’re seeking with more. What we’re missing now with “enough” and what makes us think that once we cross the bridge to “enough”, we wont find ourselves in the same place we are now. “More” is a symptom. Enough is a balm.
Reboot, by Jerry Colonna, asks a marvelous question: “How am I complicit in creating the conditions I wish to avoid?” It’s a very stealthily difficult, probing question to think about. One of the things it may bring to the forefront is how many of us try and not disappoint others, and thereby we very much disappoint ourselves in the process. We live lives other people, we think, would want us to live. We do things we think others wish us to do. We put our emotions on auto pilot to be this “other” for someone else, while never taking the time to decipher if we, ourselves, wish to be the “other.” Another way: we never think about who we may be or what we may want inside. Disappointment has a way of taking up space in your head. It’s an automatic door closer to possibilities in the world that our true selves would be open to. It takes time to de-clutter the mind and understand our expectations for ourselves, rather than other’s expectations of us, but it’s a job well worth the effort.
The idea is this: You use something that has the capacity to do multiples of what you can do on your own, for your benefit. Leverage is selling a product where you make money while you sleep. Leverage is writing timeless content that does not expire. It’s allowing the thing to compound on it’s own with little to no input from you. Leverage usually does not require your presence and many times it’s better that you not be present, for fear of making an emotional mistake.
Your relationships-the relationships that mean the world to you, do not work on leverage. They work in a linear fashion. They compound slowly, but you have to constantly feed it, over and over. You must invest your own sweat, time, blood, tears, presence in these relationships. The payoffs are enormous. Lifechanging.
The trick is to use leverage in your work and financial sphere, to provide you the opportunities to use linearity in you personal one.