I finally went hiking today, and it gave me a lot of time to think about what I wrote the other day. Ironically, I prayed the night before that I would wake up at the time I needed to get myself out the door, so I don’t know if it was just an answer to prayer or another unfortunate night with only 5 hours of sleep, but either way, I went hiking, so that was a win.
The part of my last post that resonates with me the most is the idea that we have this internalized, cultural “list” of objectives, and some people are really good at knocking them out, but they become addicted to them when they do. I’m really sensitive to feeling pressured into doing things, but I have an angry history with these pressures, since I can recognize them as external and manipulative at the same time I know they are inside of me and I struggle to escape them. I think it’s the constant sense of lack when it comes to those objectives that raises my awareness to their otherness. You find yourself thinking, “Hey, wait a second, who told me I was supposed to do this?”
Contrast that with going hiking today: I didn’t need motivation, since I already wanted to do it. And that was 5 hours of hiking, thank you very much, which I greatly prefer over the stupid gym.
Which makes me think, I should really just cancel my gym membership. Sure, it has been nice to get my heart rate going from time to time, but I remember this wonderful multi-year stretch when I had no gym membership at all, and it was beautiful because I never felt pressured to go to the gym. I’m more than happy to take a walk around my neighborhood, though, it just means I probably won’t go out when the temps are in the 90s. But who cares?
Sometimes, you get so used to fear, you come to think of it as a strategic advantage, but it’s not. If ‘perfect love casts out fear’, then fear is not something you should invite inside.
I often beat myself up during the day if I’m not productive enough, but this is nothing more than fear of man. If I do nothing with my day, whose business it that, but my own? Self-studying a career change is not easy. If you’ve never taken an extended absence from employment, you have no idea how much structure that employment gives to your day without you even knowing it. There is nothing else to qualify. All of the haters and HR personnel who appear in my fearful imagination can, and should, go fuck themselves. It is my money, it is my time, and if God has set this aside, I should be all the more astounded that his ways are not our ways. Thus far, he has said not a singe world about this time being a bootcamp the way all the productivity gurus probably would. I get to fight back on this. I should fight back on this.
A friend on Sunday made a note about our callings in life, how people are often called to things they aren’t necessarily excellent at. It reminds me of the phrase, “God doesn’t call the qualified, he qualifies the called”. While hiking, it made me think about how stupid I sometimes feel with all of this study, like, what if I just let go of that and keep pushing forward? What if, whatever my deficiencies may be, God never asked me to be great, he only asked me to be obedient? Of course this, too, flies in the face of all the self-help stupidity, which will never hesitate to tell you that you are a worthless piece of shit unless you put in your 10,000 hours to be an expert so you can work 4 hour weeks, while not giving a f*ck about numerous things (except more productivity), and then magically being so good you can’t be ignored, because, you know, that’s the power of the Kingdom, right? …right? [I’ve only read one of those books, but the other ones are certainly popular]
I had many other thoughts, but I’m already tired of putting so may “I”s in this post, so I think I’m just going to wrap it up, here. No, seriously, how has the spirit of fear come to so thoroughly dominate my life?