Change Your Four-letter-word Selection to Get Through This Mess

I’m watching more movies these days than ever. I suspect you are too.

We’ve never been movie-goers/watchers. Watching a half-dozen movies a year is a busy year for us.

I’ve watched more than that just this month. End-of-day, late-night surfing the wasteland of HBO/Showtime/Epix, etc. and settling on one from the endless selection of mind-numbers.

Occasionally Shawshank or an equivalent will be available and I’ll ride it to the end, for the umpteenth time.

More times than not, it’s falling asleep to today’s’ fare of incessant gunfire, explosions, and f-bombs.

F-bombs are no longer bombs – it’s now just regular dialog mixed into virtually every sentence. I hope I never get comfortable with it.

I’m also continuing to read a lot during this crazy time -keeping my daily commitment to read at least an hour each day.

I decided to save the expense of buying more books and have gone back to my bookshelf and re-reading – in some cases for the third or fourth time – books I consider to be five-star in terms of impact.

Thus it is that I’m into the third reading of another of Steve Chandler’s many books, this one entitled “Time Warrior: How To Defeat Procrastination, People-pleasing, Self-doubt, Over-commitment, Broken-promises and Chaos.”

Whew! Any of those energy-drainers resonate with you? They all do with me. So it’s back into the book looking for that life-changing magic pearl.

Chandler is a long-time favorite. He’s a renowned business and life coach, coacher-of-coaches, author of over 30 books, sought after speaker, and a recovering alcoholic now over 30 years sober.

Chapter 24 in Time Warror (his book chapters are rarely more than 2-3 pages) jumped out at me where Steve encourages “risking your identity” and “letting your cherished, built-up personality fade away“, suggesting that egos and personalities “are finished being made up for most people in junior high school. Therefore, they are just full of adolescent fear, worry, and anxious hope.”

See those two four-letter gems in that last sentence – fear, hope.

Is there more than a little of both of those around right now?

Well, yeah. Huge doses of the former, too much of the latter.

Too much hope? Really?

I side with Chandler on this. I put “hope” and “wish” in the category of useless, harmful four-letter words that are a wasted response to the most damaging four-letter word of all – fear.

Here’s why – and I’ll quote Steve again:

“Here’s the problem with hope. Hope is always producing a longing .. a longing for external circumstances to change while ignoring the beautiful internal resources already there.” He quotes another source, attorney and high-performance business coach, Fernando Flores, who once wrote: “Hope is the raw material of losers.”

Yikes – pretty strong, counter-culture, contrarian, anti-religious stuff.

But does that make it wrong?

Not when you think of where “hope” and “wish” take us. They take us to a place that doesn’t exist – the future. They take us to a place over which we have no control other than what we do today – the future.  They take us to a place where fear is the main resident – the future.

“Hope” and “wish” and “fear” are made-up words that keep us from the two four-letter words that will render all three of them invalid and useless.

Drum roll, please.

WORK & LOVE

If I’m hoping and wishing, I’m also fearing. And I’m stuck, frozen.

If I’m working, I’m moving. And I’m in the only place where fear can’t exist.

Drum roll, please.

THE PRESENT

We have hope and fear, fear and hope. Back and forth.

Interchangeable.

Unsustainable.

But when we take some form of decisive action, right here, right now, fear has no place to reside. That’s called living in the present moment.

The regrets of the past and fear of the future cannot exist in the present moment.

One of the other five-stars that came off the shelf this last month was Steven Pressfield’s quick-read classic: “The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles.” The book is about an unwelcome but always present companion we all have – the “Resistance”, that thing that freezes us, the author of procrastination, that small voice that questions us at every turn.

In his chapter entitled “The Ego and the Self”, Pressfield believes “angels make their home in the Self, while resistance has its seat in the Ego. The Self wishes to create, to evolve. The Ego likes things just the way they are.”

To Pressfield, the Ego believes:

• “There is no God. No sphere exists except the physical and no rules apply except those of the material world.”

The Self believes:

• “God is all there is. Everything that is, is God in one form or another. God, the divine ground, is that in which we live and move and have our being. Infinite planes of reality exist, all created by, sustained by and infused by the spirit of God.”

All the great religions of the world encourage us to bring ourselves to the present moment. Jesus reminded us that “today has enough problems of its own.”

These times will test the theory.

Will we freeze in hope or will we create in love? Will we wait and hope for the revealing of a “master plan” or will we create one of our own.

Making good use of hard times

That’s the title of Chapter 36 in Time Warrior. Chandler reminds us that “sometimes hard times and recessions can return us to the principles we always wanted to live by anyway. The principles that give us pride and satisfaction. Like this one: a penny saved is a penny earned. Or, self-reliance.”

It’s been quite a ride over the last 10 years, hasn’t it – riding these multiple rising tides?  And now comfort, complacency, convenience, conformity have been interrupted faster and deeper than ever in history.

What are we left with? Simple. The same things that got us here before: work, love, creativity, self-reliance, principles.

Donald, Nancy, and Mitch are not coming to save us – let’s stop waiting for them.

Let’s climb back into the present moment, create, work, and resurrect the uniqueness God gave each of us and shed the barnacles that accumulated on that uniqueness as we “enjoyed” the aforementioned four C’s.

And leave hoping and wishing with their sidekick, fear, in the devil’s toolbox.

Your comments are important. They help us stay on track.  Scroll down and let us know your thoughts about all this.

If you haven’t joined our growing list of readers, you can do so at www.makeagingwork.com.  Sign up for my weekly blog there and receive my free e-book “Achieve Your Full-life Potential:  Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”