I'm planning to start learning French sometime soon...
I've been wanting to visit Iceland for ages....
I'd love to start learning to paint, but right now I can't because....
Next year I'm really going to focus on getting in shape....
How often do you hear these? I catch myself saying things like this a lot. And it's time to stop.
We are special mammals: aware of our own mortality, and aware of social pressure. This can be a curse or a blessing. It depends how well we can embrace and understand the following paradoxes.
1. A year is not a long time, but a year ahead feels far away.
Every birthday and every new year you can hear it: "Wow, that year went by so fast", or "I don't even know where that year went!". It's true, a year goes by so quickly - because it's short. Our foolish surprise is because we expect those 365 days to last longer. Looking back it seems like a tiny sliver of time, rapidly vanished. But looking forward the next year feels a light year away. Try making plans with somebody for a particular day 12 months in the future.
While we over-estimate how long a year is, we under-estimate how much we can achieve in it. There will never be an exercise programme called "One Year Abs", for how could that ever compete with its seven-minute rival? But in a year you can change your body completely, become excellent at speaking a language, start a business, or write a book. All you have to do is start now and be consistent. It really is that easy.
2. Life is short, but it feels long.
We feel that we have plenty of time. "That project can wait until we graduate / have a sabbatical / get married / have kids / move house / retire". No, it can't. Your life isn't an endless deferment. Life is short. One day it's gone. Unless you see through the illusion of having 'plenty of time' then you're destined to wake up one day, old-aged, wondering what happened to your life.
3. We want the end result, not the process.
I'd like to be fantastic at drawing, but I don't want to go through the painful struggle of learning. Many people feel the same with languages: they'd love to speak fluent Mandarin, but don't fancy putting in the hours of work that would require. To achieve something you have two options: either to be so fixed on your goal that hating the work towards it is worthwhile, or to enjoy the process that gets you to the result. The latter seems preferable to me, but the former works. If you have neither - no obsession with the outcome, and no enjoyment of the process - then you will not get to your goal. So drop it.
We walk through life in a daze. Time appears to go quickly. Life is short, even if death feels a long way off. Start something now. If you want to write then start now. If you want to draw then pick up some paper and a pen. You want to get fit? Go and do some push-ups right now. Someone you've been meaning to see - call them right now and arrange a time. And commit to doing something every day.
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
- Henry David Thoreau
“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, magic and power in it. Begin it now.”
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
No comments:
Post a Comment