Follow Your Bliss, Find Your Passion, and Other Misguided Advice
Have you located that nebulous and elusive thing called bliss, passion, essence, or calling? Are you living your legend? Have you discovered who you are and what you are here to do? The proliferation of books, courses, workshops, theories, and gurus offering to show us where to look and how to find it suggests that lots and lots of people have bought into this idea (which appears to have been perpetuated by the New Agers and many intelligent, educated people who ought to know better).
Included in the message is a sort of imperative along with a sense of urgency: if you don’t find out what you’re supposed to do (so you can do what you love), you’re missing out Big Time! But the belief that we must discover the particular thing we are meant to be doing in order to generate this feeling of bliss or ignite our passion often results in nothing more than a paralyzing seizure of anxiety.
I’ve done my share of participating in this bliss-quest game. And I’m actually pretty aware of what excites and fully-engages me and what makes me feel energized and alive. But what I’ve learned, among other things, is that there’s no seed hidden deep within me (presumably within my unconscious as opposed to within my actual physical body) that holds the key to unlocking my passion, calling, bliss, or whatever you want to call it. In fact, the unconscious is exactly the wrong place to look for that sort of information since—far from being a secret garden—the unconscious is mainly composed of decades of random programming, zombie (automatic) subroutines, and bad or outmoded habits. Its primary job is to keep us alive, not to enliven us. The unconscious is the main enforcer of the status quo.
Head Trips and Stalemates
Along with being exhorted to find and follow our bliss, we are conversely cautioned to distinguish our wants from our needs so that we can direct our efforts and attention on filling our needs instead of satisfying our wants. Needs = important. Wants = unimportant. So one message is that needs matter but wants don’t and another message is that it’s extremely important for us to take the time and put in the effort to discover what we want. The result is that most people can’t answer the question what do you really want? and in this climate of confusion they settle for immediate gratification, which is ultimately unsatisfying.
There are two more factors that muddy the waters. One is the insidious and deadening effect of clutter, which can take up so much of our conscious attention that we literally can’t think straight. How can we possibly focus on what we really want when we’re preoccupied trying to find stuff, remember stuff, organize stuff, and plan how to deal with our stuff? When our lives are filled with clutter, there’s not much room in our heads for anything else.
Another element is that we confuse wants with goals. We don’t know what we really want, but we set goals for ourselves anyway. Often our goals are things we believe we should do or should achieve. It isn’t surprising that the failure rate for reaching such goals is extremely high. But a goal is a means to an end. It encompasses the actions that will get us something we want. If we haven’t identified the end, the goal is meaningless. I began a strength training program at a new gym at the beginning of October. Going to the gym for an hour and a half twice a week is a goal that moves me toward all kinds of things, such as energy, strength, health, and a sense of well-being. I don’t always feel like going, but I’m committed to getting the results. I know why I’m going; so I go whether I feel like it or not.
Big Picture “Wants”
I wrote about my 30-day challenge to answer the question what do I really want? here. Since then I completed and reviewed my 30 index cards, which contain 481 individual items. Some items surprised me, and it was interesting to see what kinds of things showed up the most. (As an aside, going to the gym did not appear once.) After mulling it all over, I realized that every item on those cards fit into at least one of 12 categories, what I call my Big Picture Wants:
Freedom
Energy
Stimulation
Clarity
Equanimity
White Space
Creativity
Joy
Resilience
Connection
Expansion
Impact
Five years from now, I might want other things, but these are the things I want to have in my life right now. And there are all kinds of different ways to get them. Working out at the gym gets me freedom, energy, resilience, and connection, for example. Just identifying these big picture wants helped me gain clarity and equanimity.
Identifying big picture wants expands the playing field rather than contracting it. There is no one right path or course of action to realizing them; there are many different paths, many different ways to be yourself, express yourself, contribute yourself, and enjoy yourself.
2014: Time to Start Shoveling?
Wherever we are and whatever we’re doing, we all have the ability to Step It Up. The quality, impact, effectiveness—and maybe even the length—of our lives depend on it.
So why don’t we do it? Why do we keep playing small when we know we’re capable of so much more?
We may think our reasons are personal and unique, but I suspect that in most cases the real reason for not Stepping It Up is the same for everyone. And it’s so basic and mundane it’s almost always overlooked.
The culprit is clutter, plain and simple. Or rather, it’s the mountain of clutter we’ve spent our lives constructing: physical clutter, mental clutter, emotional clutter, the clutter of things left undone or not being attended to. It doesn’t matter how few or how many categories we have for it or how different one type of clutter seems from another. Clutter is clutter is clutter.
We can’t reach for the stars by climbing that mountain of clutter.
We may manage a few steps, but inevitably we’re sucked back down into all that…stuff. We won’t get anywhere by trying to manage or rearrange our clutter, either. Let’s face it; we have developed the habit of creating clutter. We have become clutter junkies. We’re convinced we can’t live without it.
So we rationalize, justify, and explain it away.
Or we deny we have a problem.
Or we admit we have a problem but insist we’re working on it.
The result is always more clutter. Yes, our attempts to deal with our clutter add to the mountain of clutter. So do our failed attempts to Step It Up. In my experience, this is the real “law of attraction”: clutter attracts more clutter. It’s as if the mountain of clutter has magnetic properties. The more undone, unfinished, messy stuff there is in our lives (the bigger our mountain of clutter), the more likely it is that we’ll just keep adding to it.
Clutter is not innocuous; we pay a huge toll for keeping it in our lives. Clutter not only takes up physical space, it also uses precious mental resources. Clutter that preoccupies us taxes our brain’s bandwidth and can literally make us dumber, at least temporarily, by as many as 10 to 14 I.Q. points. The effect is like being sleep deprived all the time. This kind of preoccupation also negatively impacts the brain’s executive function, which results in diminished ability to focus our attention and a decrease in self-control.
The absurd thing is that whatever we’re not doing or not dealing with is likely taking up more of our attention than it would if we were actually doing it or dealing with it. But habits are hard to break. For clutter junkies, there’s only one way out: we have to get rid of the mountain of clutter. Pick a corner, start shoveling, and keep going until it’s all gone. No excuses, no rationalizations, no explanations. Just do it:
- Clean it out
- Fix it
- Address it
- Replace it
- Finish it
- Toss it out
Then declare yourself a clutter-free zone!
If you’re in the market for a New Year’s resolution, this trumps the usual suspects. Not only is it simple, straightforward, and all-inclusive, but the results are guaranteed to surprise you and may even provide you with a brand new view of the world.
Intentional Optimism: Be Bold
At the end of this video, Jason Silva asks a great question: Why shouldn’t we turn our lives into a work of art?
As he says:
I can decide that I’m going to see the world through rose-colored lenses. I’m going to be optimistic. I’m going to look for the beautiful in every possible experience.
That INTENTION, that agency, coupled with action…with editorial discernment…it creates a self-amplifying feedback loop. In other words, the INTENTION to be optimistic makes me stumble upon all these things that make me feel more optimistic and so on and so forth.
But that requires a boldness of character.
Yes, we all view the world through our own particular lens–and the lens through which we view the world has an enormous effect on what we see. Once we recognize that what we’re seeing is not “reality,” but a limited facsimile thereof, we can alter our perception. But wishing it or wanting it to happen won’t make it so.
The magic starts with creating an INTENTION.
Clarity
After I finished clearing out my garage three weekends ago, the path ahead (my path, that is) suddenly became so much clearer.
The garage clearing was the culmination of a purging and cleaning process I started at the beginning of May. I went through every room and every closet or cupboard in my apartment, getting rid of things I thought I’d still be holding onto when I died, things I’d never, ever considered letting go of before. A few times I woke up in the middle of the night imagining the contents of a closet and thinking, “That can go, and that can go, and that can go.” The next day, all of it went. Into the garage.
I amassed so much stuff to give away it filled a quarter of my garage. I couldn’t park my car in there during the hottest month of the year. Animal Humane came to pick it all up in July, and I haven’t missed a thing. In fact, I keep finding more stuff to let go of. Now I keep a box in the garage for items I’m finished with. Once it’s filled, I drop it off at Animal Humane.
The whole thing started spontaneously one Monday when I glanced down the hall into my bedroom, noticed something, and asked myself why the heck I still had it. One thing led to another, momentum grew, and soon I was tackling areas I’d been avoiding for years. I even replaced all the shelf liner in the kitchen cabinets. I got rid of the contents of three two-drawer filing cabinets—and the cabinets. I tossed decades worth of personal journals, donated eight or nine bankers boxes of books, gave half a dozen flower pots to a neighbor, and found new homes for drawers full of art supplies that need to be used, not stored.
Just Do It!
It felt great to lighten the load. It also felt great to attend to all those nagging things, large or small, I’d been noticing several times a day (again, for years) that needed fixing or changing. I took care of all of them. I had a whiteboard in my office, and as soon as I thought of something or noticed it, I wrote it down. Had I been putting off making an appointment or checking something out? I put that up there, too. Sometimes I’d take care of something so quickly the ink from the dry erase marker was still wet when I erased it.
I had expected it would feel good to have accomplished so much. I had expected to feel a sense of satisfaction. What I didn’t expect was how much clarity getting rid of all this stuff would create in my life. I’d like to believe that if I’d known, I would have done it much sooner. But no one can see into the future. I don’t think I would have believed it if anyone had told me it would be like this.
Last winter, I came across this quote from Krishnamurti:
We think that through choice we are free, but choice exists only when the mind is confused. There is no choice when the mind is clear. When you see things very clearly without any distortion, without any illusions, then there is no choice. A mind that is choiceless is a free mind, but a mind that chooses and therefore establishes a series of conflicts and contradictions is never free because it is in itself confused, divided, broken up.
I wrote this post about it in February, but only now am I really getting it. Only now do I see that having all these messy, undone, or unfinished things taking up space in my head actually creates confusion and distortion. Suddenly, there are very few choices I need to make. I’m not having the usual mental debates about what to do or rationalizing why I’m doing or not doing something. The path ahead is clear. That doesn’t mean it’s easy or guaranteed. But it is clear. Clarity is a game-changer. It’s also a huge payoff to get for doing nothing more than taking care of business.
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