A great thing about living your life the way you want is, well, the fact that you have a lot of autonomy about the direction of your life. A not so commonly talked about side effect of living your life the way you want is… You’ll be met with uncertainty a lot of the times.
I recently read the book How to Build a Human: In Seven Evolutionary Steps and while the entire book was very interesting, the ending was especially touching to me. The book is about the evolutionary history mankind starting from the primates, and boy did we take a long time to get here. We like to think it’s been around 2000 years or so since we became like this, but it actually goes back 50000 years or so. We converged into Homo Sapiens but way before then there were many different “species” of mankind.
They mostly were different because of the geographical location they lived in; their different environment caused them to evolve differently. But all of them did one thing in common: press their hand against the wall of a cave and leave a handprint. This was done in modern Indonesia, Spain, Australia, Africa, and America. There is something that unites humanity together even if we’re different species living in different continents with no way to communicate with each other.
Another thing that we all have in common is a religion. Religion seems to serve one primary cause: consolation against the biggest fear of mankind, the unknown. What happens when we die? We don’t know. What happens in the dark when we venture out without a torch? We don’t know. What is that sound coming from that cave? We don’t know. What is the meaning of life against the cruel universe who seems to punish us at random? We don’t know.
The search for the truth in the face of the unknown has given us two diverging paths: spirituality and science. We’ve gotten very good at scientific thinking and reasoning when it comes to studying the observable universe. Then when we ran out of observable things to figure out, we became better at figuring out invisible things. Among them is the mind, so it makes sense that psychology as a study developed later than physics, for example.
Buddha figured a lot of the reality thing out 2600 years ago and as his very late student I often times lament that I learned this a bit too late (which always leaves my peers in the order speechless because I’m like, half their age). Coming back to the original topic at hand, what does this have to do with living life the way you want?
When we don’t live life the way we want, some kind of an external force (karma) encourages us to keep repeating the life we already know. It wants you to continue the habits that you already had, it wants you to keep liking the things you already liked, it wants you to keep living under your upbringing’s influence.
Another important side effect of a karmic life is, it will do its best to reduce the number of unknowns in your life. There will be lots of things that sound attractive to you but when it’s time to actually go get the things you want, a giant dark cloud of uncertainty will emerge and likely prevent you from doing what you want.
Living an intentional life breaks the shackles that once bound you. But at the same time, what do you do with your newfound liberty? At first you will have a period of savoring your freedom and enjoying it, things will all feel good. When that novelty of freedom wears away, what do you do?
This is when practice becomes challenging, because in the face of uncertainty you will want to retreat back to the warm embrace of certainty and the life you already know. What we have to realize is that the fear is not an essential corollary to the unknown; it’s possible to not know what lies ahead with ease.
This fact is especially valuable when we tackle procrastination. Why? Because many of the things we procrastinate tend to be very related to the unknown. One big category of procrastination is things feeling too big and overwhelming; the other is the feeling of not knowing what to do (sometimes these mix for a mega-procrastinator!).
We sit in front of our computer to work on our project. Maybe you have to write an essay like the one I’m writing right now. But what should you say? How can you start the sentence? After you’re done writing the first draft it seems too short, how do you beef it up? The entire process is riddled with unknowns.
In both living your authentic life and tackling procrastination, the remedy is the same: we have to sit with this unknown with ease and look inward for the next step. This benefits from self-trust, because it gets a lot easier to make steps when you know you can easily handle any kind of consequence that comes from the step.
I guess today I really wanted to tell you that it’s natural for you to feel afraid of the unknown, especially in the context of having some things to do. When I think of my days of overcoming procrastination I remember thinking: if only there was someone who can guide me through the process of DOING! And that is precisely why I have a coaching package that’s designed to do exactly that: Get Something Done.
Want to get something concrete done, and learn how to do anything at the same time? Click the above link and sign up for your session right now!