Promising and Creating Tomorrows

The main reason I’m writing this post is to keep a promise I made to myself a year ago. At that time, having fallen into a very unproductive writing rhythm, I resolved to post three times each month. If I maintained that pace, it would generate the highest level of blog productivity in several years.

This post marks number thirty-six of the year, fulfilling my commitment to myself. That’s a good accomplishment for a New Year’s Eve, on the verge of what most of us look to as, at the very least, an opportunity for a fresh start.

One of my best personal gains from the year 2020 was the relearning of a very simple lesson: that a habit, a commitment to keeping promises generates great power, that can be sustaining, generous and even transformational. This is the case because, when promises – or goals – are taken seriously, they bring the future present and turn possibilities into actualities.

If I tell myself that I will write a page a day, there is potential to complete a novel within a year. But if I elevate this intention to a promise, one which I bind myself to, then I am changing ‘might’ into ‘will’. I am transforming those imaginary and wishful 365 pages into certainties. When I bring myself to a state in which I trust and value myself enough to believe in my word to myself, my word then becomes very powerful, and speaking becomes an act of creation.

I have to give at least partial credit for this ‘lesson’ to Landmark Education, which grew out of the work of Werner Erhart, and whose programs have benefited me. Erhart’s expressions about promises and personal integrity are perhaps the most succinct that I have ever come across. And I’ve been using them to re-empower myself.

This re-empowering became necessary when I had to acknowledge that, over a long period of time, my words of commitment to myself had lost force. It began with making commitments that I wasn’t entirely committed to, so that it became easy to back out of them. And this progressed to the point where I hardly believed promises I made – to myself or others – even as I spoke them.

Taking up the lesson again meant, first of all, not to make any promise or commitment lightly, but only after consideration, and a clear-sighted acknowledgement to myself that the act of promising is either total or it is nothing. Because if a promise can’t be relied on, trusted in, completely, then it has no more power than a passing whim. And life had shown me how little whims are worth, when it comes to building a life.

One of the first fruits of beginning to take promises and commitments as expressions of my integrity, was becoming reacquainted with the power of will. I began to see how, once I’d promised something, and when abandoning that promise became an impossibility, the ‘will’ to fulfill always generated a way. It’s true. It works. However magical it may seem – and it sometimes does – it is also that simple.

And so, completing and posting this post, on this day, in this ‘last minute’, is important and meaningful to me. It reinforces the power and possibility of promises, as every fulfilled commitment does. And it deepens my believe in the magic that 2021 will bring!

Reflections on a Year

I think it’s always a good thing to look around and remind oneself of all that there is to be grateful for. That may be even more important at a time like this, when it’s so easy to dismiss the entire year as lost, painful and wasted. We are all looking forward so eagerly to 2021, to things being different, to hardships being in the past. It’s tempting to erase 2020 from memory, to let if fade like a bad dream.

But there are always flip-sides to a situation, aren’t there? Silver linings and serendipitous nuggets of goodness. Some of these have emerged because of the painful aspects of the fading year, and will disappear once things are more normal. For example, a lot of us have been blessed with a sense of more space and more time, both for privacy, self-discovery and solo pursuits, and for intimacy, ‘other’-discovery and activities shared with those we have bubbled with. So while I’ve shared accounts with many friends of our struggles with isolation, stagnation and boredom, we’ve also had experiences of re-connection, enlivening and reinvestment that would have eluded us if not for the strange pressures of this year.

Dilok Klaisataporn /iStockphoto

So, much has been lost, and much has been gained. We can each tally up the sides of our personal ledgers, if we want to. But I’m not so sure that it’s important to generate a ‘net’ result. I’d rather just hold on to as much of the good as I can. I want to keep the fresh eyes the year has given me, maintain the renewed connections, be more deeply appreciative of things I took too much for granted or allowed myself to be bored or impatient with.

Personally, I’m not one of those people who is very eager to see things return to the so-called ‘normal’. I’d rather welcome the many new normals that are coming about, though many of them are sure to be ugly. Collectively, we have opportunities to shape and tweak these ‘developments’ as they take place. And it looks like there are massive shifts taking place in work places, in political space and in communities everywhere, as well as inside of each home, each life. Which means there will be displacement, anxiety and fear. 2021 may or may not bring the level of upheaval that 2020 did. But it can’t help but bring a lot that’s unexpected, new and disruptive, because every year brings that.

My list of things to be grateful to 2020 for will be a long one. For all the insanity, it’s been a beautiful year. I won’t be sad to see it end, but I’ll try to hold onto much of what it has given me. It’s good to be alive!

Step by Step

It’s going on a year and a half since I retired, and I can hardly recapture the frame of mind that I lived with for so many years, rising five days a week to go to work and organizing the rest of my life around those committed hours. Fortunately, I managed through most of my life to work at jobs that excited and motivated me, so that whatever resistance there was to the constraints on my time was balanced by an eagerness and commitment to the work itself.

Quite a few of my jobs were project or contract related, or were new or cyclical in some sense, providing me with a sense of creating, developing or building on something that either had a finite end, or that would reach a natural, periodic conclusion. Working through a school year was like that, or counselling a group of youth transitioning from incarceration back into their communities, or putting together a life skills program for a new group home. This enabled me to work at specific jobs for one to three years, and then to move on at a natural end or completion point. Which in turn enabled me to feel just fine about my frequent changes of employment.

My very last job, however, was quite different. I remained in it for over ten years, which proved to be much too long. And while it was work that brought me onboard with a new and growing enterprise, and so had those elements of newness and development, this aspect was essentially done after the first three or four years, after which I found myself in increasingly stagnant and repetitive environments and routines. I should have moved on from there but failed to make that happen, and had become a burnout case by the time I coasted numbly into retirement.

Looking back, I’m struck by the levels of depression I experienced in that last job, and by the depressed energy and suppressed frustration and resentment in those around me. It wasn’t an atmosphere I had much prior experience with. In the past, I’d always felt well able to flee such environments long before the souring had set in. But this time around – having failed to succeed with a number of applications for other jobs, I felt stuck, resigned and hopeless. So I accepted what I’d always considered a ridiculous and unthinkable proposition: remaining in a role where I largely went through the motions, unhappy with the quality of my own work, and finding little or no fulfillment in it.

Retirement has become a kind of drawn out adventure. I feel that I’m engaged in an ongoing process of reinvention and rediscovery, but it progresses slowly. The pressures I’m under are set principally by myself. Goals and projects are my own, self-defined and willingly embraced, but not promptly executed. When I don’t accomplish what I’d planned to in the course of a day, there is no external consequence, and that’s an aspect with two faces.

On one hand, I’m thrilled at how completely free I feel. What didn’t get done today, I can easily put off to tomorrow; there’s no one to care or even to know. The absence of the mounting pressure I’ve associated with procrastination all my life is really beautiful. Whenever I do get to whatever it might be, I feel motivated by my own concerns and wants, instead of by a desire to avoid criticism or disappointment from someone else.

But the other side of the coin is that I let many things slide for longer than my own standards can tolerate. And the feeling of disappointing my own expectations cuts deeper than those complaints I occasionally got from others. And they are a lot harder to dismiss.

Maybe the best side of this process of developing a self-generated work process and rhythm is the fact that it’s so personal, and has involved me getting a deeper understanding of how I tick. For example, I’ve confirmed that the most productive work times for me are late morning – shortly after getting up from bed, and late at night – early morning, really – when the day is over and the next hasn’t yet started. That latter time is like a space in between, and it feels that way, almost as though it floats between those two days, untethered from regular clock time. My late morning and my early morning sessions have totally different feels, and I’ve also found that the second is always best if I’ve already made an investment in the first.

There are a few other things I’m learning about myself and how I work best that are carrying me toward the goal of writing and publishing regularly. I’m sometimes amazed that I’m seeing a piece of the puzzle of myself so late in life. And I’m also seeing that some lessons are so particular to my current stage of life that I couldn’t have learned them any earlier than I have, just as I’ll never do the writing I failed to do at earlier stages, because I’m no longer the person who held those seeds of stories inside himself.

All of this together seems to be opening up a present tense in my living that, while it’s always available, can only be entered into by conscious choice. And I only seem capable of making that choice when I’ve freed myself of distractions and fears, while at the same time accepting whatever structures and demands the moment brings for what they are. And often, as weird as it may seem, that means being willing to act without explanation or understanding. It’s like giving voice to another dimension of my own awareness and intelligence, and trusting that it won’t let me down, because it can’t.