If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed, or subscribe by e-mail. Don't forget to leave a comment or send an e-mail from the about page. Thanks for visiting!
As I was looking back on the path my life has taken recently, I realized that I had run into a serious glitch in my thinking.
I imagined that as I gained more and more mastery and accomplishment that things would simply be easier and I would be able to accomplish things with less effort and basically be able to run things “off the top of my head”. What I’ve been doing isn’t even close to being drudgery, but I had expected that at some point the amount of effort needed would decrease slightly.
Gear?!
I realized this not long after I wrote the story of my life. I sat back and in a moment of comic clarity realized that I’d been had: I was running just as hard as I ever had. I decided to take this up with my guides, and the conversation went something like this.
Me: I’ve been putting in some solid work
Guides: Yes, you have. Good work.
Me: Nice try. I thought things were supposed to get easier.
Guides: Well, let’s use one of those technological parables you like so much. You are familiar with riding a bicycle, yes?
Me: Yeah yeah.
Guides: When you are climbing uphill, you are in a low gear and you are putting forth a constant effort. What happens when you get over the top?
Me: You shift into a higher gear and keep….. Oh (unprintable)…
Guides: Exactly. If you were still messing around with what you were doing, you wouldn’t be having this problem. The fact that you are still pushing the limits, still seeing what you can do, means that you have to keep “pedaling”.
So there we have it. After I got done laughing at myself, I decided to let this new understanding stay in my awareness for a while and see what happened. Given time and contemplation, I began to see this from a different angle, and with a more modern twist:
It never ends!
Think of your computer. I would bet money that you would say that you wish you could upgrade it in some way. I’m not a gambling man, so why would I make this wager? Simple. It’s in our nature to expand to capacity. Hardware developers are constantly scrambling to keep ahead of software developers who are looking to squeeze as much as they can out of the hardware.
The same can be said of us in our lives. As we continue refining ourselves and developing our skills, we naturally become more adept. However, that doesn’t mean that we’ve explored everything. On the contrary! Now that we can crawl, we want to walk, then to run, then to fly.
When I gave up soda, for example, I expected a general improvement in my health. I got it and my health is still getting better. What I didn’t figure into my calculations was that the newfound health and energy would go directly into serving my purpose.
What do I know about shifting?
Ironically, this realization led me to start intelligently deciding how much to put forth. Instead of wasting my energy trying to “pedal” as hard as possible (or flooring the accelerator), I decided to go with what felt right. Ironically, backing off a little bit has helped me be much more effective.
I find that not only am I getting everything done, but that I’m actually able to get more done than I was previously when I was blindly throwing everything I had at my goals. I’m still running in the mid-to-high nineties, but now I’m doing so much more intelligently, and that is the huge difference.
If you liked this post, then check out the RSS feed.
(Thanks to bury-osiol for the image.)
