Praxeum

I’m making some plans, chipping away at tasks to try to reach a few goals. The goals cover a pretty broad spectrum of life: fitness, health, work, and focus.

I find myself often distracted from these tasks, finding something clear and fairly easy and obvious to do instead. I think the reason is fairly obvious, the goals and plans and tasks are slightly intimidating, I worry about not being able to reach them, some of the tasks are too big and i need to break them down, some of the plans are too complex.

I had a thought today that something I plan to do with a big project at work could help me with these plans and projects as well.  Basically instead of trying to plan out every little bit of work and activity and research I need to do to get where I want to I’m going to think broadly about the end goal and specifically about only what i need to do next, once finished i’ll think specifically about the next thing and so on.

So… here goes.

I have been thinking about surrender lately.  It’s part of a duality I consider often. Especially  in times of stress I find if I fight against the situation I become agitated and often end up working against my goals, trying to swim upstream to a point across a raging river. But if I surrender I calm down and can adapt myself and the situation, jumping into the river, riding the torrent and making my way across safely and with much less effort.

The duality comes in the other concept or phrase I often motivate myself with Just Keep Going, that as long as you are going as long as you haven’t stopped, haven’t given up you are ok.

In this way I don’t think of surrender as giving in, and certainly not as giving up. More an acceptance, a realization of what I can change and what I can’t and deciding what matters.  I don’t want to change the direction or strength of the river, I want to get to the other side.