No B.S Friday: I’ve got a theory.. and a story.
This isn’t easy to explain.
I was trying the other day, and it kind of felt like it was just easier to lay it out in a story. Like a fable. Which I think means that I’m getting wise. Or that I’m reverting to childhood simplicity. One of the two.
Anyway, the story goes like this.
Imagine you have just successfully raided a pirate ship. You have put all the treasure in a sack, but then you hear someone raise the alarm. The only thing you can do is jump overboard and swim for shore.
And so that’s what you do. Splash. And so now you’re swimming. But you’re also carrying a big sack of treasure. It’s heavy. And now you realise that the shore isn’t quite as close as you thought it was. And there’s a bit of swell. You’re not sure if you’re going to make it.
You do your best. You try as hard as you can. But you’re starting to get tired. You’re hanging on as best as you can but now your survival instincts are starting to kick in. They want you to drop the sack and look after yourself.
You wrestle with this for a while. The desire to have what you want versus the impulse to survive.
Eventually the instinct for survival wins and you let the sack fall to the bottom of the ocean floor.
When you get back home, nobody can understand why you did what you did. “But that was everything you ever wanted. Why did you let it go? Are you afraid of being happy?”
That’s the story. (Sorry I don’t do happy endings. That’s for subscribers only.)
One of the great puzzles that we have to face in life is why we push away the things that we want. We push away love, we run from success, we sabotage financial freedom.
Generally, we talk about this like it’s some meaningless glitch in the system. “He broke up with her because he’s afraid of love, terrified of intimacy, and pathologically averse to head-pats.”
But it’s not like this.
The way I see it, we get over-ridden with an instinct for survival.
Because sometimes it’s a lot to hold. When somebody amazing loves us, and we don’t believe we’re worthy, we can feel like an imposter, and feeling like an imposter puts the nervous system on edge and is exhausting.
Or if we suddenly have all our financial needs met, we might then have to confront the real reasons why we’re not happy. That’s a scary and exhausting prospect.
I don’t want to dig too much into the complexities of psychology here. But the point is, my personal belief is that it’s not fear that causes us to drop the treasure. It’s exhaustion.
Having the things we want, especially things we’ve been wanting our entire lives, can be exhausting.
If we’re not in alignment with them, they can just be too much to hold.
And so the challenge isn’t how do we learn to not fear intimacy or whatever. The challenge is how do we learn to hold intimacy and all the things we want in a peaceful and easy way that doesn’t burn out the nervous system.
That’s a big question.
But until we can answer it, we’re just wasting our time chasing after treasure.
JG.