Variety really is the spice of life
Imagine awards shows with the same person getting the win every year. Boring!
"I realize that if I were stable and steady and static, I would be living death. So I accept confusion and uncertainty and fear and emotional highs and lows because they are the price I willingly pay for a flowing, perplexing, exciting life." - Father of Humanistic Psychology, Carl Rogers, 1980
Someone, at some point, has undoubtedly had the same thoughts and desires. Conjured up the same scenarios. It is comforting. To recognise that human ideas, problems, and concepts are not unique. They are familiar to an entire species. Whatever you may be battling with, you can be sure you’re not alone.
We enjoy romanticising. Consider how things should be or how we want them to be. This utopia where we have no cause for complaint. Assuring ourselves that these fantasies are just within reach.
Get through this week of work, and I’ll be able to settle down. Hit the gym every day, and I’ll get those abs. Tomorrow I will be healthier and more energised if I skip dessert.
It’s so simple, right!? We'd be much stabler creatures if it were that easy to execute. Perhaps different creatures entirely.
We know that more work is going to come. It doesn’t just end and give you this elusive ‘break’. Sometimes I’m too tired to go to the gym. And man, I haven’t had a slice of strawberry cheesecake in ages…
We are not failing ourselves. We are simply flowing in the now. Making decisions based on our impulses. The fact that we can change our minds makes our lives more fascinating. Unexpected events and situations occur. I know I said I would do it, but that doesn’t mean I have to. Yes, it is crucial to follow through on something you promised; we all know those people… But it is a blessing that we can do things when we're ready (or not at all). There’s no hurry!
This is not synonymous with favours or gestures. If you promise someone you will do something for them, you should probably follow through. But when we tell others what we're doing for ourselves, the only person who really cares if we follow through is you.
Accountability can be an excellent motivator to getting things done, which is why we tell people. But perhaps you just didn't think it through all the way. 5 consecutive days at the gym is actually waaaaaaaay more than I thought.
We aren’t machines, with predictive cogs shifting in a methodical and staccato rhythm. We’re more like water, ebbing and flowing down the stream, sometimes getting caught in a rip or pulled into a bank, but we always manage to get back on track.
The way it is right now is the way it is meant to be, and I’m at peace with that. - Danielsun Okeyo
Danielsun is neither a Guru nor a Prophet who has profoundly influenced millions of individuals. This is a man from Cape Town, South Africa, who said something memorable.
Here’s the video he mentions it:
We'd get pretty bored if we could control every aspect of our lives. Where’s the fun? Or rather, where’s the fun in predictability? If things were stable and steady, they’d be so predictable that excitement would practically vanish. However, this does raise an interesting idea. We associate stable and steady with the ‘ideal’. Your ideal is different to mine, but I believe we can agree that neither contains a tremendous amount of negativity.
The ideal becomes tiresome very quickly. To understand and experience excitement, there needs to be a comprehension of despair. To feel those highs, you need to know what the lows are like. It's a case of yin and yang. Each is indispensable to the other.
Your ideal is sipping Spritzes on the Amalfi Coast. This can only be the ‘ideal’ because of the torrential winter rain or the freezing temperatures as you tried to sleep at night. Without the instability of weather, you wouldn’t have any metrics to compare. And since your ‘ideal’ is all sun and fun, although hard to imagine, it will lose its charm soon enough.
There’s the age-old question, ‘If you had 1 week to live, what would you do?’ The first thought here is, would you even want to know you only had 1 week? But let's entertain this briefly; we’re curious. Instead of a week, let’s make it 40 years from now; well, I’ve got plenty of time to do what I want. Maybe I won’t live as long as I hoped, but at least I know how long I’ve got, right? I can make my list and slowly get through everything I want. I’ve got this steady 40 years to tick off everything.
But as the years close in, and I’m whittled down to the final week… Am I ready? Did I do everything on my list? Maybe. Knowing how much humans change over time, we all know that one master list could never suffice. That would be too predictable. The list would have changed by magnitudes in the last 40 years. There are likely as many items to tick off as when I first wrote the thing! And because I lack the time to accomplish everything, the question of whether or not I even desired to know in the first place remains. But then, would you have lived out the last 40 years like you just did?
The invigorating side is that we don’t need to know the date will die. Because if there is one thing, above all else, that is stable and steady in our lives, it’s death. It will happen to everyone – guaranteed. This singular, unchanging characteristic of our species permits us to remain as unstable and uncertain as we please. Time is limited, and if everything in that time was stable and secure, you’d feel like your limited time was a little less… pizzazz-y.
But remember, there’s a catch to possessing so much choice and freedom. Even though uncertainty can lead to adventurous and beautiful experiences, we must endure tough and heartbreaking ones too. We get to reign over how we spend our time. It isn’t set in stone, and we shouldn’t wish it to be. We don’t really want security. That’s boring and predictable. Calculated risk is the approach I choose. Confident that things will go as planned, but with a hint of “maybe this won’t work”.
I hope something above has sparked a thought. This was swirling in my mind, so I wanted to explore it briefly.
I am doing exactly what I want, when I want. And if you aren't, how can you start?
Stay safe, and pass-it-on.