The Demon We Seldom Recognize
Purposeful reassurance for the overwhelmed
Let’s begin with a question.
How many articles, blogposts, and podcasts have you consumed lately that talk about the idea of Productivity?
2020 has been the year perhaps when we heard the most about productivity. With everything else shutting down around us, leaving behind massive craters of available time. Most of us simply felt as if all the avenues of personal development earlier blocked by the absence of time, can now be attended to. After all, it was only time that we lacked in crafting the best version of us.
But is it really so?
As months wore on, we began to realize it was not the time we had lacked. It was something else. More subtle and more deeply embedded in our systems. The inertia we experienced demanded a deep look.
The number of behavioral studies during the pandemic saw a shift of topic, which can be used as a cue in this discussion:
Goggle search term results suggest that there has been an immense rise in the search volume of the term “laziness” with the average monthly search volume in the US alone, almost 7000 searches.
The Enemy Inside
So lack of time wasn’t an issue. The issue was not outside, but inside us all along!
At this point it may be useful to share an excerpt from Pema Chödrön’s book, The Places That Scare You. In the chapter “The Three Kinds of Laziness”, Chödrön shares an immensely interesting insight:
There are three kinds of laziness: comfort orientation, loss of heart, and “couldn’t care less.” These are three ways that we become stuck in debilitating habitual patterns.
Whoa!
Did you feel the hit?
We often interpret laziness as physical inactivity. This is an untrue and rather trivialized reflection. The phenomenon of laziness is actually more than the inertness of the body. It refers to the inertia which can be observed in all the three areas of our being: body, spirit and mind.
When your body refuses to leave its comfort quarters; or when you do not find courage to invest yourself in, committing fully to any cause; or when you lose the capacity to be bothered by anything, it is laziness. A debilitating inertia that hinders you to change the state of your being.
Staying far too long in this state, repeating the behavior again and again is how we get stuck in a pattern of habit which is crippling for our development in the long run.
Now the problem is that how do we realize the nature of the problem and shift the problem-finding focus from the outside to the inside. This is a tricky problem because our normal tendency while dealing with difficult feelings is to take the path of least resistance. This means adopting ways which camouflage the disagreeable parts of us. The effort to avoid the demon becomes a major part of who we ever. It becomes the voice, the language of our personal narrative. We know these demons exist, but we turn a blind eye to them. A thick curtain of ignorance by choice stretches between our awareness and the demon that cripples us.
We may tend to think that this is how things are supposed to be. That this is the beginning of the end. But thankfully, theory and practice negate the idea.
A Work In Progress
In his TED Talk, The Psychology of Your Future Self, Dan Gilbert puts the truth down in a succinct manner.
“Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.” — Dan Gilbert
Our identities are continuous works in progress. The personal legend, each of us is a custodian of, is an ongoing saga. The catch is to get to a point in our personal legend that we make bold enough to look our demon in the eye. This direct gaze is how the curtain just disappears. The china plate of our self defined identity shatters into a thousand pieces. This is a transformative experience. This is the point where we challenge the inertia that holds us back from reaching our better version.
Challenging Inertia
The first thing to understand is that challenging your demons is not a swift, one move solution. It is work. But the best part is that it is some work that pays in more ways than one.
How many of you have heard the story of Dan Harris?
Dan Harris (@danbharris) was an experienced and established ABC News anchor when had a nationally televised panic attack on Good Morning America in 2004.
Instead of being taken a hostage to that incident where he could have surrendered it all and had submitted to a crippling sense of shame and inertia, his later life became a journey of resilience. A triumphant war song.
Years down the road, after putting an untiring effort in not submitting to his demons, Harris shared some extremely thick wisdom nugget in an interview telecast at The Tim Farriss Show podcast earlier this week.
“Seeing clearly the cacophony of your own inner landscape is how you are no longer owned by it.” — Dan Harris
When we feel overwhelmed, exhausted, resentful, we might be completely in the right for feeling the emotion. However, the trick here is to not become a vehicle of your emotion, but to become an observer of it. When we tend to not participate and instead replace our eagerness to enact with the curiosity to understand, it is a power move of unimaginable magnitude. The possibility to reimagine our worn out tapestry of life by stitching together the threads of misunderstood feelings and unrecognized patterns of inhibitions, is quite liberating.
In Dark The Light
In her fantasy novel A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin writes the oldest song The Creation of Éa. It is intact quite magical how the oldest song of a fantasy novel captures the truest truth of the real life!
Only in silence the word,
Only in dark the light,
Only in dying life:
Bright the hawk’s flight
On the empty sky.
Confronting own demons, challenging own fears and fixing own sore areas, is how we craft the life that deserves to be celebrated as our personal legend. Life is not a duration we get through. It is a labour of love that demands work.
So next time when your fears hold you back from reaching a better version of you; or your imposter syndrome becomes a daunting roadblock; or a hardened heart becomes your nemesis, go back to how you’d like your personal legend to be, and raise a war cry challenging the demon you now recognize!
You are here to raise the bar, let laziness not dent your legend with anything less.
