Tag Archives: superficial fulfillment

Trying VS Making

This might sound as a cliche but i feel many people confuse trying with making. I also feel the reason behind trying instead of making is more often than not… pure laziness.

A option-packed, easy-living world with instant fulfilment. This is the cage of our own making. We want options to try out, we want it as easy as it gets and we want results delivered immediately. The exact opposite features of any personal development endeavour.

From Siri to that new wifi coffee machine, the promise remains; fast, effortless, instant. Fast forward 40y from now to 2060, heck… even eating will be too much effort! A bio-energy feed will give us what we need while sleeping.

Of course, the point is not going back to fetching water from the well, it’s about acknowledging that some things STILL (and always WILL) need effort. And i don’t mean moving to a bigger house or getting the latest iphone; to quote Al Pacino “money is the easy thing”. The hard is to develop yourself in becoming more aware of self and others, to improving your situation management, showing patience, flexibility, forgiveness, compassion.

This is how the instant and effortless tryout lifestyle set us back:

• Patience? too much time; snapping is easier.

• Awareness? too tiring, oblivion is easier.

• Flexibility? ….impossible, too complicated, rather be rigid.

• Compassion? …naa, too much thinking and emoting.

 

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Point is there are many smart machines to tryout but only so few virtues in life. Trying them out the fast and easy way doesn’t work, you have to put some back to them for change to happen. And unlike the smart coffee maker, there is no “auto on” function, YOU have to light ’em up -every time!

Forcing the timing, 5+1 pitfalls

Forcing an action or an outcome before its time has more negative traits in the process than the gain of a successful outcome.

• If this happens once every now and then is ok. Everybody has fallen in the trap of shaking the tree before the fruit is ready. You might finally get the fruit to fall but you will be too exhausted to enjoy or you might have sacrificed a tree branch in the process.

• If this is your pattern of doing things then is not ok. You need to realize it and alter it.

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Here is what the process of forcing outcomes in the wrong timing creates

1 • It is a fun-kill. We make so much effort we forget to pay attention to anything else

2 • It increases the risk of failure. Fruit doesn’t fall, am keep trying in frustration

3 • It creates an imbalance on the effort vs time vs outcome ratio

4 • The above reduces the value of the goal. As we try and try fruitless, we begin to question if that goal really deserves all the effort. Even if we do reach the goal while the effort has been in the discomfort zone, the overall experience won’t be gratifying.

5 • All the above create a feeling of inadequacy as we constantly find ourselves in the overdoing zone in order to achieve things that don’t even fulfill us as much as we thought they would.

So what is the right approach? (if there is such thing in life…)

The simplest and easiest one (we repeatedly tend to overlook): shake the branch till you see that the fruit does not want to come down. Then move on to another branch till you find a fruit that is ready. Don’t fall in the pit of creating attachment to a beautifully shaped fruit that after shaking the crap out of it still hangs in pride. This can easily make you loose yourself and all perspective resulting even in cutting down the whole tree for that one goal. Make no mistake, you might think that specific fruit is all you will ever want from the whole tree, but this is an illusion. Anything you have sacrificed everything for, is guaranteed not to fulfill you.