A Come Back
I’ve made a very conscious effort at the start of the year to talk less and live more. Prior to this year, for year and a half I contributed regularly to my “My Story.” In most cases, I would do so in those moments when I felt I wanted to experience a sense of connection, of sharing something about myself. Interestingly, I would craft my blog posts when I was feeling disconnected, lonely, usually after having realized that a woman I’ve wanted to share my life with were not up for joining me for adventures. This year, I decided I would write when I had adventures to tell.
This is going to change. My life is not always filled with wild adventures (in fact its relatively tame) and AI concepts show up in my life in the most mundane moments. I’ve been given this amazing opportunity to help guys along in their journey to creating more fulfilling lives and relationships and so my goal is to return to my more regular posting because anything I might have experiences with (from extraordinary to the mundane) might help some guy through their own journey. So, here I go…now by sharing this really vague “insight” and sharing stories over the next few weeks from experiences that pop up from time to time in my memory and my unfolding future.
Hi guys!
When I began my AI journey one of my very first forum posts asked the community about how to “handle success.” It was odd that I would ask about how to handle success especially because I was, at the time, experiencing very little of it when it came to meeting and attracting the kinds of women I desire. But somewhere deep within my manly and expanding gut, I knew that blaming the outside world or myself for my failures in attracting women was just as dangerous as attributing successes in attracting women to myself or external circumstances. The mechanism or mode of thought that blames the outside world for my lack of meaning and fulfillment in my life was the same mode of thought that, when I would experience some success, led me to attribute that success to something like “luck” or “a good hair day” or even “poor judgement” on the part of the girl. “Who would be in to me”?, so I thought back in the day.
So, I was keen to problem of attributing my “success” to something external just as much as I was aware of blaming my failures for sucking with women on everything and everyone outside of myself.
Since the start of the year I have experienced plenty of “success”…wait…that’s hard for me write — “success.” I’m not even sure I believe in “success” anymore. See, over the past year my AI journey has deepened, like way deep, to the point where I am developing an wild kind of acceptance of all of life’s outcomes. Failure has evaporated for me in many areas of my life. I’m not saying I don’t “fail.” It’s just failure doesn’t shake me to the core like it used to. As “failure” goes, so goes “success.” See, I began to realize how these two words are inseparably connected way of talking about my experience. The “success/failure” frame of talk, or paradigm, or worldview is in reality a subtle and masked way of understanding my experience in ways to really highlights not my own actions – HERE AND NOW – but the outcome of my actions.
“A deed once accomplished is both the world’s safest treasure, and it’s heaviest burden,” is what one philosopher, Josiah Royce, said, or something like that. Accepting life as it comes, moment by moment, accepting feelings of unreadiness, uncertainty, nervousness, anxiety, fear, confrontation, embarrassment, pain, disconnection, frustration, powerlessness, or feelings of being unfulfilled and yet ACTING in the face of these has “lifted” the burden of any actions I take.
Practicing acceptance has become a pathway to “freedom” for me. I don’t experience failure, nor successes. I just live my life in the pursuit of the experiences I want and when I can’t find those experiences, I ACCEPT that and redirect my focus to taking the ACTIONS that will give me the experiences I want.
The “outcome” of my pursuits are the result of where I am focusing in the here and now. In any moment, I know how I feel, what I want to feel, and I am constantly in an active process of working out how to give my self that experience I want in a way that puts me in control. And, if I’m unable to work that out, or I’m in a position where I cannot have control, I accept that, and workout what degrees of influence I can have over my experience. I’m a “script” worker. How do I feel? How do I want to feel? And how am I bridging the gap? Where does my focus tell me about how I am bridging the gap? These questions have gone a long way in helping me to remain focused in my present experience and creating the life and world I want, even in the moment by moment flux of life.
So what does all this mean in real life stories? Stay tuned, yo…