Travel
3:43 AM in Cusco
Sep
“Do your practice and all is coming” – K Pattabhi Jois
It’s my birthday. I woke up at 3:43 AM today. I was deep in thought about Resistance and doing My work.
My boy Israel gave me “The War of Art” ( clever play on Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” a military treatise), a book by Steven Pressfield, that I wouldn’t call “life changing”, however I would call it “Life Change Affirming”. I read all but 4 pages in one sitting on the train back from Machu Picchu to Cusco last night. I finished it this morning.
Pressfield defines resistance as “an energy field radiating from work-in-potential.” He goes on to say “it is by definition self sabotage” that ” kicks in when we seek to pursue a calling in the arts, launch an innovative enterprise, or evolve to a higher station morally, ethically, and spiritually”.
The solution to overcoming resistance, he says, turning Pro. Conventional wisdom says the pro does his work for money while the amateur does it for love. Pressfield argues the amateur doesn’t love his craft enough, otherwise, he’d be a pro at it.
He weaves these threads together by differentiating between someone who has and has not overcome it. Essentially, the amateur is still succumbing to resistance. The professional has a “cold blooded character” and an attitude and resilience about his work that creates the framework for conquering it. He views his work as craft and not art.
Two ideas significantly resonated with me in this text.
- Resistance can be used as a true north. Essentially, the thing that you are most afraid of and intimated by accomplishing is likely the thing that is most important for you to achieve. For me, that’s this brand.
- He also perfectly encapsulates why resistance has been getting the better of me.
“Resistance outwits the amateur with he oldest trick in the book: It uses his own enthusiasm against him. Resistance gets us to plunge into a project with an overambitious and unrealistic timetable for its completion. It knows we can’t sustain that level of intensity. We will hit the wall. We will crash.”
The War of Art, Pressfield p.75
The final act of this book is an attribution of support to a higher power, Muses and Angels, that begin to help you as you become a professional about you work. In physics this would be the equal and opposite force to resistance. He attributes this to God. I’ve struggled with my view on God. The white man in the sky, passing judgement and being prayed to by the slave who’s getting lynched and the lyncher at the same time, I can’t fade.
However, he didn’t lose me. My idea of God has evolved from agnosticism out of frustration to a deeper understanding and belief. I now think about God, or the divine, as the universal consciousness or that which animates, connects, creates and brings light to us all. I’m comfortable with this interpretation. The personification of it/them, to me, are literary devices and since he’s an authority on the classics (Ancient Greece), muses resonate with him.
The reason I say that this book is life change affirming and not life changing is b/c in some ways I’ve been gravitating towards this in a different framework. I was deeply touched by Buddhism when I underwent a bit of a spiritual revival. I’m in Yoga 200 hr training, and a central tenet has been start where you are and the work becomes your journey.
To me this is another useful, and well articulated framework. He even quotes the Bhagavad Gita which is basically the Yogic bible.
“To labor in this way, (offering our work up to God without hope or Ego) The Bhagavad-Gita tells us, is a form meditation and a supreme species of spiritual devotion.”
So: this is me, doing my work/practice which I believe to be my True North. This is my culmination of all the work I’ve been doing to become Pro. No delusions of grandeur, no, 72 hours worth of hard effort expecting it to blow overnight.
This is my affirmation of consistent, diligent dedication to making the things I’ve learned spiritually, economically, and politically accessible to my patnas and those like us wherever they are in their journey.
Have to get this ..have to find my true north
Definitely bro. If you need help finding it, my boy who gave it to me has a book business and I could probably get that worked out for you. You’re on the right path though even wanting to check it out.
Dope blog, seems like a pretty cool book. Might have to add it to my reading list. Seemed a little judgy in the pro vs amateur comparison but also not completely wrong.
I see how you could feel like that. It could be in my articulation of the message and how I received it as well, so I think you should at least give it a read and see if that’s how you feel about the book itself. I interpreted it more as hard truth as opposed to a value judgement. If you aren’t living and actively pursuing your purpose, in his estimation, resistance is why.