“The world doesn’t conform to your wants.”
Today I want to explore this idea. This insight might help us become less anxious and overwhelmed when things don’t go according to plan.
So let’s get started. This reminder that the world doesn’t comfort to our wants came to me after I read the book “4 Thousand Weeks” by Oliver Burkeman and is particularly relevant when you hit obstacles and challenges. When you find a challenge, you don’t want to spend time solving the problem, you don’t like having a problem, you just wish you could get it over with, and go back to the smooth efficiency you were at before it came up. You hate the fact of being interrupted by a difficulty, a difficulty that deviates you from your plan and expectations.
For example, as I write a blog post, I often get stuck in phases where I don’t know what to write, and that phase is painful. I feel frustrated. But after some reflection and thanks to Oliver Burkeman’s insights, I understand that it’s possible that this frustration is being heightened by the fact that I’m trying to force the pace at which my writing unfolds. To my frustration, I can’t. As Oliver Burkeman says in his book – You are unable to force the pace of most things.
So what happens is that there’s a goal and a plan to reach that goal. However, there’s a failure to acknowledge the problems that will naturally surge during the execution of the plan. Sometimes our aversion to solving this problem is so strong that we let it override our desire to reach our goal. In other words, we postpone it, delay it indefinitely, or actually quit and move on to something “easier”.
Does that mean we don’t want it bad enough? I think that plays a part, but I think that, for the most part, it’s a problem of impatience.
I’ve been very patient with many things in my life, I’m aware that things take time to grow and I’m a big fan of compound interest, not just in terms of finance, but in doing good actions – good karma. The key is this: I don’t mind moving slowly, as long as I know I’m moving in the right direction.
One question could be – “how do I know I am moving in the right direction?” but that’s a whole other question for a future blog post.
For now, a more relevant question is this: Is it true that a source of our frustration is our effort to try and control the pace at which reality moves?
When I am thinking about a topic to write about, the beginning phase is often overwhelming. There are dozens of topics I want to learn more about, and writing about them helps me think deeply about them, and I want to think deeply about all of them. I want to analyse everything and learn as much as I can.
I eventually decide on what to write about, and that’s exactly when the problem starts. The obstacle slowly arises when you finally choose a line of reasoning to follow. You get excited and feel joyful in the process of writing and thinking. You get really deep in the “flow state” as Csikszentmihályi calls it, and that lasts until the end of that day. You go to bed really happy that you feel on track and made progress.
However, this is when things can get complicated because the next day, as you live your normal life and get exposed to more information and have more insights you have new thoughts and more potential options to explore. This, in turn, makes you want to pursue those thoughts and explore them more deeply. Additionally, because this new set of insights is fresh and more recent, it seems much more interesting and worth pursuing than the work you started the day before.
That’s when you feel pulled by an infinite amount of forces, to go in many different directions. You feel aimless, like a captain of a ship lost in the sea. As Seneca said, “If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favourable.”
It’s also interesting to note that the thought of dropping the current activity to follow a “shinier” activity – shiny object syndrome – is often only tempting when an obstacle arises on the current path. If writing is going great and there’s the feeling of control in the line of reasoning, there isn’t the temptation to leave it – the flow state is ON. It’s only when momentum is lost that suddenly secondary thoughts and ideas seem tempting. Even more, because such thought is fresh, it’s easier to immediately write a few sentences about it, which leads to the feeling of increased productivity, like time is being used better. However, the reality is that it leads to dozens of half-baked ideas.
This is why patience is so key. If that pattern is followed, nothing will ever be completed because obstacles will always arise and there will always be paragraphs that will be hard to start, regardless of the topic. By applying patience, we don’t wander off the path we’re on, blanks and obstacles are dealt with, and a stronger connection is built with the work that is being created.
Having the patience to sit with a problem, and look at it from the perspective of it being a stepping stone and not a huge brick wall can help you produce more meaningful work. This comes by accepting that things take longer than the time we estimate. Lowering our expectations seems to be a partial answer here. By accepting that doing a certain activity will take longer than we think we will not be so frustrated when events out of our control come up and demand our attention.
Kind Regards,
Martim
