This sounds tedious because it’s tedious. Life is, broadly, tedious. It lacks the cinematic grandeur of a montage. We want the montage where the protagonist runs up the stairs of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and suddenly is a champion. But montages are lies. The reality is the commit log.
Commit 8f4a2: Failed to wake up early.
Commit 8f4a3: Failed to wake up early.
Commit 8f4a4: Woke up early, felt tired.
Commit 8f4a5: Woke up early, felt okay.
The process is incremental and boring, and it’s the only way anything ever gets fixed.
But what if the objective isn’t to fix something and move on, but just to improve things? What if meeting, facing down, and addressing challenges isn’t something we do in order to get to a place where we can then live life, but the actual substance of life? In Four Thousand Weeks Oliver Burkeman writes:
Once you give up on the unattainable goal of eradicating all your problems, it becomes possible to develop an appreciation for the fact that life just is a process of engaging with problem after problem, giving each one the time it requires—that the presence of problems in your life, in other words, isn’t an impediment to a meaningful existence but the very substance of one. [emphasis added]
The process may be incremental and boring, but it is also one you can get steadily better at. Perhaps even learn to enjoy—the progress you’re making, the constant stream of small triumphs that come from relentlessly addressing challenges just beyond your reach … just beyond for now, anyway, as you notice and probe and test and evaluate, select a promising approach, implement and repeat and re-evaluate and fine tune, internalize. Now the challenge is no longer a challenge because you are a person who by nature responds to it properly. And one who has become a bit more skilled at the process. Certainly one who reaps the benefits of proper responses and improved skills.
Maybe even one who takes pleasure and satisfaction in not only the benefits, but in engaging with the process, i.e. life itself.
Only in the last few days have I taken to heart the piece of advice that you quoted:
Once you give up on the unattainable goal of eradicating all your problems, it becomes possible to develop an appreciation for the fact that life just is a process of engaging with problem after problem…
I’m now working on unlearning all of the habits and sayings that I realize I default to that presume a posture that problems can all be eradicated. We’ll see how long it takes.
It may take less time than you expect! For me it was a nearly instantaneous shift of focus from what I’d like to accomplish in the future to what I’m able to accomplish in the moment. In another context, Burkeman writes this:
Once you truly understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so many you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem. Instead, you get to focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of experiences you actually do have time for—and the freer you are to choose, in each moment, what counts the most. [emphasis added]
Extending the insight: once I truly understood that I’m guaranteed to fall far short of almost any grand goal I might conceive, falling short stopped feeling like a problem. The universe as a whole is getting along pretty without my help. Meanwhile, there are people and situations in my immediate vicinity that could use a little help, little enough that I’m capable of giving it—and by giving up on my grand goals I’m now free, in each moment, to act in the way that counts most, right here, right now.
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
–Marcus Aurelius
“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered.
An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.”
–G. K. Chesterton
Once you see these things as “problems” you’ve already lost half the battle. Live in a way that is harmonious with your inner nature. Fix your heart and learn to see the joy and surprise in life’s little inconveniences. Allow yourself to suffer when you need to and then move on.
Sorry if that all sounds trite, but poetry is the only way to discuss such matters IMO
