Newsletters
April 2009: Why you can't always "Just do it."
Did you ever wonder why despite your best efforts and your most sincere desire and your absolutely clear intention to lose that weight, or exercise regularly or meditate every morning or give up your relentless grip on control or keep any other resolution that you may have made to yourself that you KNEW would make you and those around you happier…did you ever wonder why much more often than not you just don’t do it? Unless you’re very unlike most people, you’ve had the experience of failing to do what you really wanted to do not once or twice but countless times in your life. Confusion and suffering around this issue comes up so frequently for students and clients with whom I work that I was once seriously considering writing a book entitled: “I Know What I Want and What I Need To Do To Get It, So Why Don’t I Do It?” In fact I got clear that I actually WOULD write it. But guess what? I didn’t write it. That was four years ago. I still haven’t. I’m one of those people who has a bunch of things that have been on my to-do list that I think would be great for me to do. I know what it would take to get them done. I know that I have the ability to do them. I’m real clear that I want to get them done and that there would be great value for me in fulfilling these commitments, and yet, they remain on my list, undone.
There are of course other things that I do handle, many of them so quickly that they don’t even make it to the list because I take care of them almost as soon as I think of them. So what is it that determines whether they do or do not get done? Why is it that with some things I am one of the world’s greatest procrastinators yet others get taken care of immediately? I used to tell myself (and others who solicited my opinion) that "you’re just not committed to the things that you say you are committed to" or "you don’t really want it badly enough because if you did you would do it." “Based on results” I would righteously proclaim, “you’re not really committed because if you were, you would have handled your resistance by now”. It always sounded right when I said it, and people rarely argued with me, but now, well, I’m not so sure. Maybe things are not so either/or, so black and white, so “either you are committed to doing what you say you are or you’re not.”
Lately I’ve been considering another possibility and that is that I AM committed to doing what I say I want to do, AND I also have another commitment that is in direct competition with this one that seems to be prevailing right now. Let’s use the example I used at the beginning of this essay. My conscious commitment is to write a book about why people don’t do what they say they want to do. OK, so six months after coming up with this brilliant idea, I realize that I have written exactly three sentences. BUT, I remind myself, although I haven’t actually written quite as much as I had expected I would , I HAVE spent a tremendous amount of time and energy thinking about it and feeling guilty about why I haven’t written more. So in my mind, that counts as something doesn’t it? I mean, I may not have written much, but I really am serious about this project because if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be obsessing about it so much, AND all of that obsessing counts a time put into the book. It’s just that it didn’t actually show up as writing yet.
I know how crazy this sounds, and as embarrassing as it is to admit it, this IS the way my mind works. It can rationalize not doing something by claiming that feeling guilty and coming up with reasons and excuses why it didn’t get done counts as legitimate time put into the project. I don’t think that I would apply this kind of thinking to someone who I was paying to do a job for me, but I seem to have found it easy to apply to myself.
So, my conscious intention IS to write the book, but unbeknownst to me, I have this or more likely THESE other intentions that I'm not conscious of that are in are in direct competition with the commitment that I am aware of. The trouble is that until I can become aware of what they are I will continue to feel guilty and incomplete. I can’t see those other, competing commitments until I stop rationalizing, justifying, and excusing myself and start telling the truth. The truth isn’t that I’m a bad, lazy, dishonest, uncommitted, or stupid person; the truth is that I haven’t done it. Period. The rest is just judgment and speculation, which has nothing to do with the truth. It’s just my mind making up stories which have little if anything to do with reality. The problem is that when I buy into them, I diminish my ability to recognize the competing any commitments that may be overriding my conscious intention.
Once I tell the truth, without blame, shame, guilt, justification, or rationalization, just the raw unadulterated truth, then what has been outside of my field of perception comes into awareness. In this real-life case I began to see that there were multiple commitments that I was too busy honoring to even begin to get around to writing the book. Among them were:
A commitment to avoid the possibility of failing to complete the project. If you don’t start you can’t not finish it.
A commitment to avoid the possibility of writing a book that wouldn’t get published or would get bad reviews.
A commitment to protect myself from the possibility that this project that might take so much of my time and energy that I would have to sacrifice other things that I didn’t want to give up.
A commitment to maintain the balance and equilibrium in my marriage that could be disturbed by my taking on a project that required a lot of my time and attention.
A commitment to avoid confronting subject matter that could reveal something about me that I didn’t want to see or reveal to others.
A commitment to maintain the status quo in my life and not risk upsetting the applecart.
A commitment to avoid the possibility of disturbing or threatening others who might resent me if the book is successful.
A commitment to avoid disgrace and possible humiliation if the book is a failure.
Etc.
Bringing these concerns into awareness allowed me to examine their validity and to become clearer about the nature of the risks involved that I was unconsciously trying to avoid. When we do this we may come up with strategies for dealing with these concerns that we hadn't previously considered.
Telling the truth about not writing the book is what enabled me to see and tell the truth about my unconscious commitments. When you do this, usually one of two things happen:
1. You get OK with not doing it and no longer hold it as a commitment. or
2. You are no longer possessed by the negative feelings that accompany an incomplete commitment and being freed up you may find yourself putting yourself more fully into the project.
In my case it was kind of a combination of one and two. I got clear that although the book was a good idea or concept in my mind, that my heart just wasn’t really in it. I did have a desire to pursue this subject, but not necessarily in the form of a book. (Perhaps something more like a newsletter article instead!). This insight enabled me to see what DID have meaning for me and what I could put my heart into and it turned out to be a book but on a completely different subject. Linda and I have been working on that book for a while and is way beyond the ‘wanna write it’ stage and well into the final edits stage of the process and will be published in about six months.
Although the writing process of this book has not been without it’s challenges and obstacles, there has never been even a moment when I doubted that it was the right thing to do or even considered the possibility of not completing it.
But what has been the greatest gift in this process, far beyond the production of the book itself, has been the peace of mind that I have found in relieving myself of the self-recrimination that I used to experience when I failed to fulfill the resolutions and promises that I made to myself. It’s not so much that I’m letting myself off the hook when I don’t do what I say I want to do (which I still find myself doing from time to time) but rather, I’m better able to see enough of the picture to come to terms with the underlying concerns that may be blocking my ability to fulfill my conscious desires. And that makes all the difference in the world.
Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food, but all that is changing. There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn't bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: YOU ARE BRILLIANT, AND THE EARTH IS HIRING. The earth couldn't afford to send any recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here's the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don't be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done. When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren't optimistic, you haven't got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.
Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refugee camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums. You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisher folk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say, the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way.
Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity's willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. "One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice," is Mary Oliver's description of moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness to the living world.
Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers. This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century roots. Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself. The founders of this movement were largely unknown Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty. But for the first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit. And today tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, and non-governmental organizations, of companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled in history. The living world is not "out there" somewhere, but in your heart.
We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. Think about this: we are the only species on this planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time than to renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can't print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.
Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours. Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, a one with twenty-four zeros after it. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe.
So I have two questions for you all: First, can you feel your body? Stop for a moment. Feel your body. One septillion activities going on simultaneously, and your body does this so well you are free to ignore it, and wonder instead when this speech will end. Second question: who is in charge of your body? Who is managing those molecules? Hopefully not a political party. Life is creating the conditions that are conducive to life inside you, just as in all of nature. What I want you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television.This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, challenging, stupefying challenge ever be quested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn't stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn't ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hopefulness only makes sense when it doesn't make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.
Previous Newsletters