We Can Do Hard Things Ep 238

But it gets worse, you see. We then try to cope by revving up the angst, don’t we? We use coffee and fast-speak and sugar and staying back at work longer. We grind harder. Try harder. Think harder. We should be able to work our way through this. We think this is what will fire us up out of our funk and get us back on our game. It’s a self-perpetuat

A situation came up about money. We were running out of money. I began to get tense. I felt as if a huge weight were literally sitting on my head. I began to panic. I had to find a way out. Until I found a way to solve this problem, I could not relax. I couldn’t enjoy the sunshine on the water or the eagle sitting in a tree right outside my window.

let the thoughts that “only I could rescue us” come and I let them go. I decided to see what would happen without my input—even if it meant that everything would fall apart. Sometimes you just have to let everything fall apart. Stopping my actions was the first step and the hardest one. Not saving the day was going against the grain of how I operat

Aren’t we then quite foolish to maintain the tension? Because with this tense/no control situation, we have two problems: 1. tension/stress and 2. no control over life. In a no tension/no control situation, we would have only one problem: no control over life which can be experienced as frightening or freedom.