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!