Wednesday was a hard day. I can't remember the last time I've really 'woken up on the wrong side of the bed.' But that day made me understand that saying with a whole new level of reality.
I wish I knew what the cause was. Ostensibly, I slept in (till 5:07! The indolence!) and so my morning kind of dragged on and got off to a slow start. (Like today, in fact.) But I can't see that accounting for it. "OK, what 'it?'" You ask. Well, that whole day, I just felt...Bad. All my old addictions flared, all my old habits of procrastination, feelings of badness, self-criticism. It was kind of boggling. It felt like the ribbon of Grace that has been sustaining me moving forwards... this feeling of self-confidence, and self-kindness. This feeling of being kept company by a real and loving friend (God) all the time, or at least whenever I choose to call on him. All that was... not totally gone. But... less. Not powerful enough to sustain me and move me forward as it had been.
But I was prepared for this. Some of what I have been reading is about how to deal with the bad days. We all have bad days. But what you do with those bad days is super important. It's important to learn how to "play poorly, well." meaning, if you're playing golf and you're having a really bad day, you need to have the discipline to not beat yourself up, not let yourself continue into a self-pitying death spiral and keep getting progressively worse. Instead, you play your best, which that day may be pretty bad. When I saw what a bad day it was, my goal was just to 'maintain altitude.' Or perhaps, 'maintain attitude.' I accepted that I wasn't going to be doing any climbing, probably, but I could at least not go into a nosedive. So I took a long nap. I wrote stormy stuff in my journal. I worked through (some of) my three thousand plus email inbox, deleting old emails. It was an almost useless job, but it was about all I could get myself to do, and at least it was something that wasn't actively pushing me deeper. And even had a slight positive benefit. I tried sitting down and asking my higher self what the heck was going on. I went for a walk. It was an unpleasant and largely unproductive day, aside from the meetings that had already been scheduled and thus were required of me. (Hey hey, that sounds like a promising tool for helping during future 'bad days.')
But I count that day as a great success. I feel like it's the hard days that really show me where I am, in terms of personal development. And being able to handle the hard days well will lead to eventually being successful with my goals.
The next day was similar. Not as bad. Starting to get some momentum back, but still fighting against a wall of blah and negative inner voice. Where once there had been proactivity, now only procrastination. I could feel that draining voice so clearly, "oh, man, this sucks, you suck. anything you're going to do right now will suck." And I knew that this was the most important time for me to take courageous action.
Sometimes, to do something, even though you 'know' that it's going to suck, and your hearts not in it, and all the voices in your head are telling you to just give up, is the hardest thing in the world. But that is the critical moment. I have these deep grooves in my brain. Like wagon ruts. On a two-hundred-year-old wagon trail that's been in use every day. The grooves in the ground are so deep, it is impossible to turn the wagon off the path, once it's on it. The wheels would just break or be ripped off or something.
These ruts in my brain say, "when it gets hard to do something, when it becomes unpleasant to imagine doing it, you must never start the thing. Or quickly give up on it and go do something else. Eventually, the discomfort will pass. The stars will align, and you can go back to doing that thing, for a while."
This is perhaps the most important difference between people who are wildly successful and me. The wildly successful people feel the discomfort, and... I don't know what they do with it. But they keep working. Either because they need money enough to put up with the discomfort, or they have developed some magic technique of making it poof away, or they have just developed the habit of plowing ahead regardless of how they 'feel' about it.
In order for me to be more like them, I must destroy those deep wagon tracks. Generally that's done by driving the wagon criss-cross over the tracks, especially if it's just rained and the soil is softer. You make new tracks, over and over again, going in totally different directions. until you can barely tell where the original tracks were.
This analogy has gotten 'off the tracks' itself. All I mean to say is, That next day (Thursday), when I could do more that just hang on by my fingernails, when it was the hardest day possible for me to do the important things (but was still possible), that was the most essential day for me to do those important things. I needed to make new tracks. This was the part of the trail that I always got stuck in. This is where I'd always lose my momentum. This is what prevented me from accomplishing any of the big things I wanted to accomplish. This day was symbolic of the struggle of my entire life. If I could change it, just today, I could change it, forever. Any day.
So I girded my loins and proceeded to mostly but not entirely fail to do that. Once again. I would call that a success. I'm not looking for remarkable changes instantly. I'm just looking for my sincere efforts to oppose and re-write that pattern. I resolved to go do the next thing. I got distracted by a piece of paper. No! back to the thing. OK, I needed my book, into my room to get my book. Distracted by another book. Skimmed through the other book, finished. Arg! Again! Back to the task: I went into the room I was working in. I did the thing! Yay! Success! I procrastinated so much I didn't have time to do any of the other things. But rather than sinking into despair, I looked at my efforts. They were sincere. I looked at my results... I think they were better than they would have been, in the past, when I didn't try to oppose that rut. Or rather, where I tried to oppose it obliquely: trying to make myself feel good so that I could work on the thing.
That's like my other realization: the Doom Cloud is dispelled not by meditating or therapizing it away, but by doing the action that I'm avoiding doing which is giving rise to the doom cloud in the first place.
In the same way, I become productive, not by making myself feel good and happy so I can be in a good mindset to be productive. I be productive by being productive, however I feel about. And once I start being productive, I generally feel better about it. Or at least go from feeling bad about it to neutral. "Screw it, just do it." Is perhaps the motto? As in, to heck with the bad effect my mood or feelings about the project may be having on the project. I will do it, anyways.
This is not to say I'm being insensitive to what feels like the right thing to do. I'm being hyper sensitive to what feels and seems like the right thing to do. I am using every faculty I have at my disposal: common sense, discrimination, all the information and past experience I've gleaned, logic, my subtle feeling/intuition level. All of it. And then I give it my best guess. And that is what I'm doing, regardless of how I 'feel' about it. Because it may be something I don't want to do. Or am scared to do.
I should say, that is what I'm trying to do, with all my might. Because right now, I'm a limp lungfish flapping it's way bonelessly up a steep incline. I am not very effective. But dammit, I am not going to stop the effort in the slightest. Because it's having some effect, and some is all I need. If I am just a tiny bit better at fighting this, every time, eventually I will be good at it.
Conversely, that means, and I must be prepared for, being a lot bad at it, for a while. As long as I'm prepared for that outcome, I won't give up. I'll know, "yup, this is me being really bad at this. Again. We knew this would happen, and will continue to happen. But this is the only way I will ever get not bad at it. And I am getting less bad at it, steadily. So you know what? Awesome. Kudos on your effort, your bad but getting better. Don't give up on it ever, and soon you'll have fair weather.
So, I can't conclude this by saying I'm doing well. But I'll conclude by saying I'm doing pretty badly, but I'm doing it really well.
-IOut
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