How to Live Life as an Adventure
In my last post, I talked about assessing the things I do in life in terms of alignment, rather than difficulty. I received a question (did I mention I love your questions?) about how to reconcile that with the approach that minimizes desires and accepts whatever happens. To answer the question, I’ll tie together three concepts I wrote about separately: Desires, actions, and outcomes.
Desires are things we truly want to do or achieve in life. Not what we should do, not what others want us to do, but what we want to do from our deepest, truest essence.
Actions are what we do in order to realize those desires or move toward them.
Outcomes are the results of those actions.
I don't think we should minimize desires—desires are the best signposts on the way to creating the life we truly want. I believe that following them leads us on the path that maximizes our growth and our impact. However, to ensure we follow the right signposts we have to distinguish between true desires and faux (ego-based) desires. The clichéd example is the massive car aficionado desiring a Ferrari because of a true passion for fast cars, vs. the "midlife-crisis" guy who wants it from a place of lack and low self-worth. A more subtle example of a faux desire was me a few years ago, thinking that my biggest desire was to start a tech company, when in reality that was a projection of who I thought I was (a tech entrepreneur) and not who I truly am (an artist, teacher, etc.). But it took a lot of work to see that when I was immersed in the tech startup world, surrounded by tech entrepreneurs.
Once we clarified our true desires, we have to take action to achieve them. When our actions are aligned with our desires, things that are objectively difficult become mentally easier, because we know we're doing them to grow and move toward what we want (this was the topic of my last post).
Those actions have outcomes, and that's where we should minimize our attachment. Humans in general and high achievers in particular tend to think they know how things can and should unfold, and do their best to control the process. So when we have a desire, we think a certain action will result in a certain outcome, bringing us closer to our desire, usually on a certain timeline. However, beyond doing our best, we have little control over the outcome or the timing, and the path to our desire isn't always as straightforward as we wish. When things don't pan out the way we expect, we tend to feel defeated, make up stories about what it means about us (or others), and generally lose momentum. We stay attached to the outcome, rather than the original desire (or a more appealing one that emerged).
When we think so linearly, we narrow our vision and limit the field of opportunities that could get us to our desire, instead of staying open to the endless options we can’t yet see—or to the fact that those options can lead to an even better outcome. When we're too attached to the outcome we wish for, or to the story of what the outcome should have been and wasn't, we lose the connection to our intuition, when our intuition is the best guide to our next aligned step. We also have a hard time seeing how an undesirable outcome can take us a step forward, even if it wasn't the step we imagined. Note that not being attached isn't the same as being detached: Detached = don't care. Non-attached (or unattached) = care but stay open to other outcomes and possible paths.
To summarize, my perspective is that we should absolutely pursue our (true) desires, but not attach to the way or the timeline in which to achieve them. Everything is an experiment, and the path to our desires is an adventure.
I hope that clears things up and inspires you to think about the next steps you're going to take to clarify your desires and take action in their direction—free of attachments!
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