Easy, you could hire someone to do your homework. Just like if you wanted to make a lot of money, you could steal it. Or if you wanted to lose weight, you could have surgery.
The point is there are a lot of means to find the result you are seeking. But that is far from the real goal.
Call it a posture, a process or a practice but when we focus on putting in the correct habits and designing the right system, the results take care of themselves.
We become far too obsessed with the results. We then think we deserve a price because we did something productive.
That is attachment. Attachment is the killer of joy. Joy comes from how we define the journey, not the destination.
So here is the basics of going downhill on cross-country skis.
Feet shoulder with apart, skis pointed down (like french fries), bend the knees, engage the hips, butt out, poles behind you, and most importantly, your nose needs to be over your toes.
And when students fall it is because of the last part. They shift their weight back, begin to stand upright, then start riding in the back seat. As a result, they end up falling like they just slipped on a banana peel.
There is a moment when you go from feeling in control to out of control and you have to make a choice. The choice is, Are you going to lean into this tension or are you going to shy away from it?
That feeling of uncertainty is amplified the more we don’t feel in control.
This might work. This might not work. But your chance of success might depend on how long you can lean into this uncomfortable moment.
There is no guarantee that the work you set out do do will actually work. And not having a guarantee terrifies us.
So much so that we develop a narrative of how this will be the end of everything if this doesn’t work out. Fortunately for us, we don’t need to worry about dying when we make a mistake at work or when interacting with our kids or when being rejected. A safe isn’t going to drop on our heads. A shark is not going to land on our house.
But that tension causes us to hesitate in our decision making. We look for alternatives that will take us off the hook. We look for a path of least resistance. One that favors safety and reliability. One that gives responsibility away so we can have someone else to blame.
Let’s be clear, the easiest path may be the correct one. But if you find you’re always taking the easy way out, you are eventually going to find yourself stuck. Pretty quickly I might add.
Your decisions can’t be better than the alternatives you’ve laid out. Be wise on choosing the path you have imagined. Perhaps there are roads that are still waiting to be discovered.
I moved into this neighborhood a year ago. When I first moved in, I noticed someone had slapped a sticker on the city welcome sign.
Over the last year, driving in, I would see it was still there. Day after day, I wondered, “When is someone going to fix it?”
It’s easy to react and say, “Who’s responsible for this?” Looking for blame is easy, fixing things is much more difficult.
But why would it take someone so long to act? Surely, I wasn’t the only one who noticed the problem. That is because the clock compromises our values. The “busier” we are the less likely we are to intervene. And so we tell ourselves:
“This is someone else’s problem.”
Well, it turns out each of us is someone. We have more power than we like to imagine. The power to make a difference, to act, to make things better.
Pulling over, getting out of the car is an inconvenience. That is friction. When something is out of our way, we are less likely to do something about it. It’s easy to pick up a piece of trash that is right in front of us. Much more difficult when we have to walk across the street.
Problems are everywhere waiting to be solved. We don’t remember what kind of person we are trying to be unless we are reminded. Once I passed the sign, I would remember someone needs to do something about that sticker. And by the time I rounded the corner, I forgot all about it. Indeed, when something is out of sight it is out of mind.
Lot of lessons to pull here. But the key take away is this:
How long do we wait before we are going to clean up this mess?
We have this narrative when things are not going our way that the universe is somehow plotting against us.
And then we stub our toe.
“WHY!?”
Despite what we might think, there is no mass conspiracy. You simply bumped your toe. You quit paying attention and as a result of something that you have deemed undesirable.
It turns out, we bump into things all the time. In a theoretical sense, we are always bumping into people. Yet, no one says, “The universe loves me” when we get a raise.
When something happens, it is neither bad nor good. It simply is the story we are telling.
The great Bob Dylan once said, “Lead or get out of the way.”
Showing up to repost that you care about a social justice movement is lazy.
What we are doing is sending a signal to our followers that this is something I support.
If we really cared about something we would post what we have done to make things better. We would share knowledge of what we learned. We would say how we have changed.
Anyone can click repost, not everyone is going to act.
Josh Allred's Blog 