The improbability of the plausible?
Life hacks are an essential fashion accessory in the new millennium, the secret sauce to a better life, a short cut to self-actualisation and I unashamedly love plunging into the depths of the Internet to find them. I approve wholeheartedly of the intent to become a better person, to serve the inner drive and purpose of growing as a being of consciousness. However you cannot really improve upon steady daily growth to ensure massive improvements, being just a little better than yesterday, it is a more modest ambition than those who want to have an overnight metamorphosis from mere mortality to superhuman powers.
I do not disagree with those who want to climb a mountain though I do think it is better to walk every day of your life than to summit only once, no matter how glorious that peak experience would be, and how much I would recommend doing it, I would not trade the one for the other. More importantly, I think it is more plausible for me to go for a walk today than run up a mountain in a year's time, but if you want to do so, it requires a lot of practice walks and the best time to start is today, which ends up being the same route to different places. If you want to achieve the improbable you have to start with the plausible.
That is because it is necessary to recognise our nature, the plausible is just easier to get to, we are not caterpillars that emerged from a cocoon as beautiful butterflies, we change and adapt slowly but we are capable of huge adaptation over the long term. We are more like blocks of granite that are slowly chipped away at to produce statutes that are created from the entirety of our characters and actions, we are the result of the marginal changes that we chose to make, though we can only achieve it through a long process of erosion. To expect a single thought or idea to suddenly change everything about you is hopeful at best, but it is not naive to look for such changes and indeed if you have not changed a little bit yesterday, if you were not a little bit better, that is a sign that you are not growing as you should be, it is at least it is a warning that you are stagnating and stuck in a morass that could trap you for years if you are not careful.
Not that having low energy day are bad or wrong, you just do not want a series of them to turn into a habit, it is natural for your energy levels to oscillate. If you did the same thing yesterday as you did today, the same routine, behaviours, attitudes, actions and even thoughts, be aware that change is needed, not for the sake of it but because it is intrinsic to having a good life and if you do not, low energy is the body telling you that nothing is changing. That constant change is like the blood pumping around your body, it fills us with Life-force and joy, it feeds into a sense of satisfaction that needs constant tending to thrive. That is because we are a constant roundabout of thoughts and feelings, each thought we have generates a feeling, and every feeling generates a thought, if you do not believe me, please take the time to observe the phenomena in yourself and note how this happens every single time, but for the moment assume it to be true.
If our thoughts are negative, our feelings in turn will be negative, and if we do not stop the roundabout we can spiral into depression or low energy. When they are positive, we feel joyful and happy, and if they are neutral or the same as yesterday, that is when we can get stuck, caught in the sense of being becalmed, of lacking direction and going nowhere. And we are comparing machines, if we are not “happier” than yesterday or even the same, we automatically feel “unhappy”, it is a binary system, that can be fooled by what we bring our awareness towards through negative visualisation, gratitude and recognising our distortions in thoughts (negative thought that have no basis in reality).
In such low energy situations, as Viking discovered to their backbreaking cost, you have to generate a little motion of yourself by getting the oars out and rowing hard, anything to gain a little momentum can get you back to the trade winds and your destination. And if you told them that they would have to row all the way back to Norway, you would have probably seen them give up on the spot and do nothing, as we do when we follow our same routines and vices. It is deeply unsatisfying to be told that the most important action you can take is the smallest of action when faced with an entire ocean to cross and we just want to be at destination, but does not stop it being true.
As such if we want to get somewhere, whether that is a healthier and happier version of ourselves, wealthier, stronger, emotionally more developed or a more self-actualised kind of person, we have to start with the smallest kind of step, we not capable of complete change overnight. Not because it is impossible, but because it is not plausible to ourselves, and that is the only person we have to convince. And the best way to convince ourselves is by taking small plausible steps towards our goal whatever that might be for you, to start a meditation habit, the smallest step might just be to find a comfy spot in which to take three breaths, to read a book a month you can start with a page a day, to be healthy can start with a ten minute walk and to develop empathy requires us to just listen to one person without an agenda of what we would like to say. And the smallest step in the habit of taking small steps for me, is simply writing the three small steps I want to be my priority tomorrow in my journal last thing at night.
Through the only real measure we need to worry about is not how far we are from where we want to be but whether we are a little further along than yesterday, and the easiest way forwards is by taking the most plausible step we can. This might not satisfy our the flight fight response to most problem, you do not get immediate satisfaction of arriving at your destination, you have to take the long view and get your instant gratitude from looking backwards at how far you have come. You do instead get to develop an underlying sense of joy at your life, there is a satisfaction in the process and joyful gratitude for a life being well spent. By taking a small step every day you can foster a sense that life is getting better because it truly does, and every day you have an achievable goal, you start to trust the process and believe that you are truly a growing being of consciousness.
By embracing the effects of marginal gain, you develop the habits of good and improving action over time, and each day you simply have to imagine the smallest plausible improvement compared with today. You develop the habit of taking action as each step forward is so small, like an Olympic swimmer slowly knocking milliseconds off their personal best, except instead of being narrowly focused, you can improve in an infinite number of areas in your life, we are given so many opportunities, that we do not even have to seek them out they will find us and beg us for our attention. We simply have to do decide which one we wish to step forward in tomorrow once we have taken our step for today, it is the simplest of routine, you take the action during the day and then decide on the next one in the evening before we sleep. It is a game that is possible to win every day, and even when we fail, we get to start again the next day, which irritatingly is small step in itself towards learning the lessons of failure, so ask yourself, is that plausible plan to you?
