#2 : At a Crossroads
How will this pan out? I can see three possible scenarios. Luckily, it is me who decides after all.
I have finally kicked off this experiment. There doesn’t seem to be a way back having made a public commitment on LinkedIn.
Well… nobody really cares other than me. Most people who stumbled across my post would have forgotten about it by now and nobody would ever think about holding me accountable. That is perfectly fine.
So why I am doing this? Do I have a particular goal in mind?
I can see three possible driving forces:
1. I want to reach the end of 2021 so that I can look back to an uninterrupted series of 365 stories. Let’s call this the «mission accomplished force».
2. I view every day as a new challenge, which I would somehow overcome heroically, making this the «suffering through force».
3. I view this as an open-ended invitation to notice more, let go and use everything (hat tip to Robert Poynton). This would be the «accepting offers along the way force».
Unsurprisingly, I would want it to be number 3.
However, my experience tells me that having to write a story every single day will undoubtedly become a burden at some point. It is not about «if», but rather «when». That is when the suffering element kicks in. I am aware and feel prepared to sustain the effort when encountering the resistance.
I would also be lying if I wasn’t looking forward to typing «#365» in front of my story’s title on December 31, 2021. On the other hand, I don’t want to make this a dependency, i.e. «if this happens, then I will be happy».
In an impressive commencement speech, Matthew McConaughey (go to 7:26 minutes) calls happiness «an emotional response to an outcome, result-reliant». Joy, according to him, is «not a choice, it is not a response to a result, it is a constant, the feeling that we have from doing what we are fashioned to do, no matter the outcome».
So how do I decide at this crossroads? What will be my mantra over the coming 363 days?
