Here is today’s Game and what’s going on.
Here is what I discovered today in Chapter 4 of Stop Doing That Shit by Gary John Bishop. The title of this chapter is “A Magical Little Sponge”
This chapter, I must say, is full of truth bombs. Please buy this book. The number of highlights and dog-eared pages and margin notes you’ll have will astound you.
Let’s dive into today’s highlights:
- You weren’t always this way, the way you are now. You weren’t always making the BS of your life so “okay” that you’ve become numb to it. You’ve deadened yourself to the crap. You just shrug your shoulders as if it’s “just the way it is” and stumble ahead.
- Where did it all go wrong for you? How did you end up in this trap of sabotaging your life? As with most people, it probably didn’t happen overnight. It was a series of seemingly unconnected events in your life where you made some important shifts in your perspective until they all came together and left you with a very distinct experience of being alive. Your experience of this life, what it is to be you and live life this way, was constructed by you.
- The problem is that you had no real sense of doing such a thing. You were just getting on with life, making your way, solving problems, going for it, but the reality is that you formed and shaped yourself through this process of living.
- Surely, you’ve heard of kids being referred to as “little sponges,” right? And you’ve probably seen how kids seem to soak up language and new experiences like thirsty little sponges. Well, in many ways, that’s true—we are sponges.* Think about how a sponge works. It absorbs what it comes into contact with, expanding and expanding until it’s full of liquid. Then what happens if it’s left out to dry? It hardens, trapping any junk that might be left inside of it.
- Now, try on the idea that you were born as one of those pristine magic sponges, going through the early stages of life soaking up this thing, squeezing out that thing. As life went on, you never really noticed that the “juice” was drying up, life was becoming more predictable, a little more parched of the new and exciting, until one day that moist magic little sponge within you had hardened. And trapped within its various holes, nooks, and caverns were the items that could never quite seem to be squeezed out. Stained. Locked in there forever. That’s how our subconscious works. In the beginning it’s clean and untainted, malleable and not yet defined. But now it’s set in place, immutable, with a very specific purpose now secured into its very core. One that you can’t yet see.
- Back in your early life, everything was new, everything was exciting and pristine. And man, you were curious about all of it. From the smallest thing to the most grandiose, you were all over it. That magic sponge was soaking it all up, filling each crevice, having no idea of the ever-increasing threat of drought. Until the day when everything was set and dried and a life of sabotage unfolded, with a firm commitment to keeping you in a constant struggle.
- Read this quote by Martin Heidegger: “Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.” You were born into a vast spectrum of potential that you’ve slowly turned into a single item. As you age, your view becomes more and more restricted; you become a narrow, constrained, polarized version of what you started out with. In short, you are addicted to the version of yourself you have become, and your entire existence is about perpetuating that myth.
- Think about it. Of all the twists and turns your life has taken, from all those possibilities for yourself, you somehow turned out this way.
- You’re now a very specific, very definitive you with clear-cut characteristics, hang-ups, and familiar emotional states and behaviors.
- If you’re like most people, you’re now spending quite a chunk of your adult life working on improving that “you.” Making it fitter, smarter, more confident, less worrisome, more successful, less anxious, more likeable, less insecure, more powerful, less uncertain, more attractive, and on and on and on. You’re now a definable, set thing that you have to make better, improve upon, and eventually win over.
- These days your life is completely about you, how you’re doing, how you’re not doing, how others are affecting you and have affected you. It’s about fixing you, improving you, altering you, changing you. A life of trying to get to that day in the future when it will all turn out in that perfect happy ending you’ve always imagined.
- And that’s what keeps you stuck. You’re trapped in the struggle to be free, yet your thrashing and squirming only keeps you contained right where you are.
- There’s an irresistible link between happiness and where your attention is pointed. Same goes for unhappiness, of course. When your attention is primarily on what’s out of reach, there’ll always be something you never quite have. And so, you struggle to have it . . . and on it goes. If you spend your life wanting to be happy, by its very nature you’re constantly starting from a place of unhappy. You, like all human beings, live each moment of your precious life in the pursuit of something that is, of course, out there in the future, regardless of whether the thing you are after is five minutes or five years ahead of you. Except the peace or joy or satisfaction you’re after isn’t “out there” at all. It’s an illusion. It’s clickbait for your brain.
- You are hypnotically following that ever-so-tempting juicy morsel of hope or stability or success or accomplishment, only to get there and realize that ain’t it.
- That thing you’re currently pursuing in your life? The job, the car, the house, the location, the business . . . that’s what I’m talking about. You’ll get duped. Then you’ll do it again and get duped again. And then again. And again. And again. And then you’ll die, and that will be that.
- For what it’s worth, that day in the future will never come. Why? Because even when you do accomplish great things, when you do get there, you very quickly realize it’s still the same you.
- YOU haven’t really changed. And that’s the problem. Different life, same you, and ultimately that’s what you’re trying to change!
- You’re not a better you, a more confident you, a more whatever you. It’s just the same you with a new accomplishment in the bag, which soon plummets into the black hole of your past accomplishments. It didn’t work—that is, it didn’t take care of what you thought it would take care of, it didn’t bring you the happiness you were looking for—so off you go again. Clickbaiting the hell out of your life.
- You’ve now set your life up like a fragile game of chess where you’ve so far been able to avoid, minimize, or suppress what I’m pointing to here. That’s not a life, that’s a strategy, and you haven’t addressed the impact it has had on your full self-expression and the diminishing of your aliveness and potential. The dulling of your edge. Settling.
- You’re more about self-fix than self-improve.
- Long after the innocence of childhood wonder has dissipated into memories, you make the extraordinary ordinary. Maybe not right away, but certainly over time. Think about the first time you got a cell phone. How about a new car? Your dream home? Remember when that was the most exciting of things? Now? Meh. You’re off on search of the next fix. Click.
- It’s not just material possessions. It also applies to love, relationships, friendships, goals, dreams, and everything else in your life that once upon a time you might have appreciated or treasured. It all gets minimized, made ordinary, and shoved down in the pursuit of something else.
- Like everyone, you have fallen into the trap of trying to fill the void by constantly trying to fix what you think is wrong or not good enough about yourself or your life.
- Perspective check: you currently exist on a planet inhabited by millions of species of animals, draped in oceans and mountains with gushing volcanoes and waterfalls and creeping deserts; spinning in an endless universe, with stars and suns and solar systems that stretch wildly beyond anything your limited little imagination can muster—and yet you’re fucked up because your job sucks or you are carrying more weight than you want or your nose is bigger than your friend’s or your phone is three models older than everyone else’s.
- That’s what this life of yours has come to. A competition. The pursuit of love or admiration or things. You’ve wrapped up this miracle—your life—in a mundane web of petty, shallow expressions of what it is to be alive. Then you wonder why you’re not happy or satisfied or fulfilled! I mean, it’s right in front of your face!
Those gems lead us to today’s Dadly Daily Declaration:
It’s time to check in. To wake up to something a little grander than your belly button and your myriad of trifling concerns. To begin to take stock of what you have turned this life of yours into.
This is your shot. You, like most human beings, have allowed your life to drift, to meander from one drama to the next without any substantial intervention from you. That’s not a put-down but rather something for you to finally come to terms with. Whatever you have done or not done, it just hasn’t been the kind of substantive force of nature required to elicit real-life change.
If you truly want to end this, you have to get committed, to give yourself fully to the notion that you are, once and for all, done with the life you have had to this point. It’s time to interrupt that drift. Put an end to it.
