How do you know if you’ve got the right balance between flow and discipline? It seems to me that you need a balance between letting life unfold before you, and forcing your way through things that stand as obstacles between you and your goals. How do you know you’re not forcing something that was never meant to be, or that you’re going to be unsuccessful in? How do you know you couldn’t have achieved more than you did because you spent too much time just letting life happen, instead of making it happen?
It seems to me that my best shot at getting the balance right is by aligning with that bigger part of me. That space Jocko Willink refers to when he talks about ‘detaching from himself’ to make important, evidence-based decisions. Sometimes I get guidance in this space and I just ‘know’ things that later I have evidence to confirm is true, but at the time I couldn’t tell you why I ‘know’ other than ‘I just do’, and it doesn’t feel like a hunch, it feels certain, as though it’s fact, without any supporting evidence to show that it is fact. To me, that is faith, and whenever this has happened to me it has never yet been wrong. The Bible refers to faith as the ‘evidence of things unseen’, and that is exactly how it feels to me. I’m not referring to religion when I talk about faith. I’m not referring to an acceptance that the writings in any particular book are true. I’m talking about knowing something with as much certainty as you would have if it had already happened, but there is no evidence in the ‘real world’ yet to validate that belief. The irony about this is that I find faith in the same space, the bigger part of me, which is also the same inner place I need to go to, like Jocko, to get enough clarity and calm to make important real-world, evidence-based decisions in moments of crisis. If you’ve experienced this, you’ll understand. If not you’ll probably dismiss this as the ramblings of a mad woman.
Coming next: Getting into the bigger part of you
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