Get on with it.
That's the basic understanding I'm pulling from the book I've been enjoying immensely. I consider myself to be a happy person, but not at the expense of being real. Sometimes, life is more challenging than other times, but I have always had a certain "get on with it approach". I am crediting my practical and hardworking parents who were raised on farms. Real farms. Like, milk the cows, weed the garden, feed the pigs and chickens kinds of farms.
They didn't study the works of Buddha. They weren't raised on works of Stoics. They were raised on reality- if the family was to thrive, the family members worked for it. How much they "felt inspired" to carry out the task was irrelevant. The task needed doing. They did it. They didn't always love it, but they did it, because as I understand it, one can't leave a cow unmilked- it would have been cruel. Empathy for creatures and people is another post entirely...but there's certainly a connection.
So this book is called The Antidote, written by Oliver Burkeman and published in 2012--I believe he must be a practical sort of man for having written the book. It seems his passion for the subject matter was that he was choking on extremist approaches to finding happiness...sunshine, rainbows, "I think I can, I think I can..." and leaving it at that. I do believe we are powerful people, and I practice positivity, but I often get there in my Grandmother's Stoic-but-didn't-know-it manner. It sounded like "it could be worse" when I was growing up, yet she and my Grandpa were happy people. They enjoyed themselves, their family, neighbours, being with people, little kids were delightful--etc... There was very little feeling sorry for selves, because there was always someone out there who could use a hand, or who had it worse, so appreciate the life being lived. Appreciate! And also, do stuff.
And now, an excerpt, because this Oliver man went on at length about motivation and I loved it--it's what reminded me of how I was brought up. We don't wait around for motivation to lift us to action--do it anyway. He points out the difference between feeling and action:
...This isn't meant to imply that procrastinators, or the severely depressed, should simply pull their socks up and get over it. Rather, it highlights the way that we tend to confuse acting with feeling like acting, and how most motivational techniques are really designed to change how you feel. They're built, in other words, on a form of attachment-on strengthening your investment in a specific kind of emotion.
Sometimes, that can help. But sometimes, you simply can't make yourself feel like acting. And in those situations, motivational advice risks making things worse, by surreptitiously strengthening you belief that you need to feel motivated before you can act. By encouraging an attachment to a particular emotional state, it actually inserts an additional hurdle between you and your goal. The subtext is that if you can't make yourself feel excited and pleased about getting down to work, then you can't get down to work....
...In contrast...who says you need to wait until you 'feel like' doing something in order to start doing it? The problem, from this perspective, isn't that you don't feel motivated; it's that you imagine you need to feel motivated. If you can regard your thoughts and emotions about whatever you're procrastinating on as passing weather [the Buddhist idea that the mind is a sky, with thoughts being weather] you'll realize that your reluctance about working isn't something that needs to be eradicated, or transformed into positivity. You can coexist with it. You can note the procrastinatory feelings, and act anyway.
It is illuminating to note, here, how the daily rituals and working routines of prolific authors and artists --people who really do get a lot done - very rarely include techniques for 'getting motivated' or 'feeling inspired'. Quite the opposite: they tend to emphasize the mechanics of the working process, focusing not on generating the right mood, but on accomplishing certain physical actions, regardless of mood. Anthony Trollope wrote for three hours each morning, before leaving to go to his job as an executive at the post office; if he finished a novel in that three hour period, he simply moved on to the next. (He wrote 47 novels in his life). [Interestingly to me--this is a bit of "so what?" because I don't know a single work..but this Oliver guy seems to anticipate this reaction...continuing on about authors who are more familiar/famous] The routines of almost all famous writers, from Charles Darwin to John Grisham, similarly emphasize specific start times, or number of hours worked, or words written. Such rituals provide a structure to work in, whether or not the feeling of motivation or inspiration happens to be present. They let people work alongside negative or positive emotions, instead of getting distracted by the effort of cultivating only positive ones. 'Inspiration is for amateurs,' the artist Chuck Close once memorably observed. 'The rest of us just show up and get to work.'
...Is it accurate to assume that we must "overcome" fear to jump off the high dive at the pool, or increase our confidence before we ask someone out on a date? if it was, most of us would still be waiting to do these things. Our life experience teaches us that it is not necessary to change our feelings, we find that we can take action without changing our feeling-states'. We can feel the fear, and do it anyway.
And do it anyway...there's the crux. Feel what you feel, and do it anyway. This is, I believe, what gets us over the 'humps'. In this reasoning, I think we benefit from knowing our feelings, or in the terms above, we can describe and experience the weather of our thoughts and emotions, and then let them pass--while--understanding that we have the capacity to act anyway. I think part of the reason I like finding ways to understand feelings is because I am actively looking for ways to let them pass. I don't try to deny negative emotions, but at the same time, I don't want to dwell, because then I have more difficulty letting them pass...as with all things, I seek to find the successful, or harmonic, tension that acknowledges feelings, but doesn't allow them to rule, so that I can act.
I am loving this book...in part, because he addresses the paradoxes I've enjoyed/disliked over the years. The paradox of wishing to stay while being excited about leaving...of deeply loving and appreciating the growth of our children while wistfully recalling their younger days while knowing that things are exactly as they are supposed to and carrying on. It's what I mean when I sums things up with "oh well!"... That's not to say it's simple, easy, or carefree--rather, it's quite the opposite: more paradox...
Cheers and chao!
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