“Who says you need to wait until you 'feel like' doing something in order to start doing it? The problem, from this perspective, isn't that you don't feel motivated; it's that you imagine you need to feel motivated. If you can regard your thoughts and emotions about whatever you're procrastinating on as passing weather, you'll realise that your reluctance about working isn't something that needs to be eradicated or transformed into positivity. You can coexist with it. You can note the procrastinatory feelings and act anyway.”― Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking
Action begets more action. Reflection woven between brings clarity. Being and doing – both. Habits and rituals drive commitment. Podcasts, reading, writing, inquiry are tools that expand and deepen our understanding, fuel imagination, prompting starting and unfolding. In doing, our gifts are revealed. The only way to arrive is to start and continue. Begin imperfectly today and keep going.
Push one domino and the next one falls. Progress is a cumulation of steps. One domino at a time. Start.
“It is not surprising, then, that though we feel intermittently gifted, our gifts are ever-present. For if enlightenment stems from a clarity of being, then talent is no more than a clarity of doing, an embodied moment where spirit and hand are one. The chief obstacle to talent, then, is lapse of being. It is not that people have no talent, but that they lack the clarity to uncover what it is and how it works.
Talent, it seems, is energy waiting to be released through honest involvement in life. But so many of us check whether we have power with the main switch off – the switch being risk, curiosity, passion, and love.
With this in mind, happiness can simply be described as the satisfaction we feel when we are in ultimate accord, however briefly, in being and doing. In those unified moments, our purpose is life and out talent is living it in its most immediate detail, be it drying the dishes or raking the leaves or washing the baby’s hair.
So when I can’t find my purpose, I beg myself to sit in a field in the sun watching the ants in hopes that I will meet my clarity. When I am convinced I have no gifts at all, I implore myself to search for the switch, to try something out of view, to gamble on what is remotely calling. When I lapse between comets, I try to watch fish swim and hear birds glide while I trudge out of synch. And in a tremor of faith, I know if I don’t try at all, it will all return surely and swiftly as light fills a hole.” – Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening