Nothing makes us feel quite as comfortable as staying right where we are. Good or bad, it’s a version of our lives that took many years to construct. We’re masters of our quarter acre. We’re on the crystallized intelligence side of the lifespan—the mentor side of the career. The ego is thrilled.
Yet, from childhood on, the soul is always hinting at another path. The older we get, the whisper becomes a howling wind threatening to blow the house down. It continues to stand at the door, knocking as we bolt it and draw the blinds, pretending not to be home. It demands to know when we plan to move on. And if we don’t move voluntarily, fate has no problem leveling the house that is our current life.
Staying the same has consequences. The more we distract, the more we disintegrate into a shriveling ball of cowardice. Stalling, pleading to stay the same, we whine, “How can we? There’s no time, no money!” But the excuses don’t keep the clock from ticking, the years from passing.
It’s not our day jobs that are wasting our lives and loves; that happens on the nights and weekends. It’s all the hours, hiding in plain sight, that we waste when we’re not working for anyone. When we give a marketplace of competing media profits full access to our minds, all our vitality. While driving, while standing in line, while making dinner – talking heads, pornographers, and machivialleans are in our ears, in our face, in our pocket, on our dashboard, at the gas pump.
The real problem is our deep desire to sabotage ourselves. Particularly when we’re trying to change, trying to shed the skin of a compliant, self-destructive version of ourselves. This is when the smart mouth, controlling ego steps in to assert its dominance with ‘what if we go for it and it doesn’t work?’ Or, a more forceful push, ‘what if we suck?’
The antidote to destruction is creation. We can’t know anything before we try. Creative projects and relationships are wells; the more we draw from them, the more they seem to fill. We invest in the calling, and it invests back in us. The time available to us multiplies.
Commitment is the bridge. Without it, there’s no path, just a merry-go-round. We’ll never make time for anything we won’t commit to. We won’t sacrifice for it. It’s commitment that keeps us in the game when we see where we fall short and realize how much we have to learn. It’s the commitment to something that gives it a chance to become something.
We have to let our hearts out of the vice, let them walk around in the world on their own, subject to its hostility or indifference, but unmoved by it. Laugh at our ego. Break the bond of loyalty with the identity we’ve outgrown. Stop defending the life we’ve built when we’re being called to a larger one.
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Those who are truly decrepit, living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middleclass men and women who are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo will last forever or else are so frightened it won’t that they have retreated into their mental bomb shelters to wait it out.