The Smallest Step
A young man who wishes to live a balanced life, but has found the process of completing his education to be all-consuming, reached out to me with something approaching an existential crisis. Genuine pain and grief, seeing a lifetime of pain stretching before him. He gave me permission to share a bit of his note with me, which asked how he could ever find the “perfect” woman, when it will take him decades to “perfect” himself, by which time…he’s out of time.
“Anyway, I kind of had things mapped out. Get an advanced degree, get a decent and fairly stable job teaching. And write. Finally, after a childhood of deep poverty, and adolescence and young adulthood escaping that poverty and trying to heal while carving out a life for myself away from my dysfunctional origins, just write. Get to really writing, taking all the years of practicing it and reading and finally having the opportunity to manifest what I had been envisioning for so long against the grain of requirements for survival, recovery, etc.”
The answer is clear in the Adulting process that relates to relationships, the first two steps being:
- Love yourself
- Open your heart to loving another person, to admitting that you want this love.
Then, you commit to taking small daily steps. What steps? Well, for every goal these will be different, but in general you model people who have succeeded at reaching your goal, and extract the common thread in their behaviors, attitudes and mental focus. DO THE SMALLEST THING that will move you in that direction, and what happens is that you will either start taking larger actions as you discover most of the obstacles were illusory…or you will be stopped dead, and realize that the obstacles were never external, they were always your own demons. Then, you can look directly at that demon and begin the work of slaying it. Or befriending it. Or unmasking it, working around it, whatever metaphor you choose. It will always be some version of fear. Fear of the unknown, of criticism, of failure, of success, of disappointment, or of confusion.
A potential clue lies in the comment about writing. If he is forty years old, and wants to write…THEN WRITE, DAMMIT! I don’t’ care if you are in the middle of grad school. NO ONE who has the time to write me a 2000-word letter doesn’t have time to write! And once you realize that the key to the gate is a mere SENTENCE A DAY, you will never be stopped by that lie again. Now, you deal with the truth: either the truth that writing is easier than you thought, or the truth that fear is stopping you.
This is that “smallest unit” theory. There is always a minimum step.
- Losing weight might be the Five Tibetans and Intermittent Fasting.
- Finances might be saving 1–10% of your income weekly
- Emotional health might be the “Five Minute Miracle” of 60 seconds of diaphragmatic breathing every three hours.
Do any of these things, and you interrupt the negative cycle, and take the power back into your own hands.
And…with writing, it is committing to a sentence every day. It works.
Namaste
Steve