Do It Anyway

I didn't want to get out of bed on a chilly morning to take the call from a client who is several time zones ahead of me. I did it anyway.

I didn't want to open bill from my insurance provider marked "personal and confidential." I did it anyway.

I didn't want to drive hours away and fight 3-day-weekend traffic to pick up an old friend at the airport. I did it anyway.

The result of these actions was one less thing I had to carry with me for the rest of the day, or week, or month, or whatever time it might take until action was non-negotiable or somehow got left behind in the annals of time.

There are lots of things I used to do out of obligation or social pressure or because someone long forgotten said I had to, or for no other reason than I felt that I should, that I now do because taking action is empowering and liberating. It frees the soul.

I live inside my head so much. I always have. I look inward first, and often. It's not so much that I'm indecisive or over-analytical, but instead that I'm a ponderer. I like to think about things. And think about things deeply. But that's not a great recipe for a full life, and it's a soft and subtle trap to getting more things done. It took me a long time to realize that.

It's only been relatively recently that I found a simple and effective antidote to this inactivity trap of incessant inner dialogue I started to feel prisoner to: do it anyway. 

Do anything anyway. 

Write the blog. Send the email. Make the phone call. Get to the store. Fold the laundry. Send the overdue thank you note. 

It doesn't even really matter what it is, though often the next first step is intimately related and quite clear as a response to waves of thought-energy bounding and rebounding in the closed system of the individual's psyche. The "something" can be almost anything. It just has to be an action taken, a task completed. That's the release valve.

Steven Pressfield calls it, or some version of it, Resistance. He appears to be more than mildly obsessed with the concept. As if all of life's daily trials and tribulations can be attributed to a single word and universal concept. Resistance. It's all about solving for resistance. Maybe he's right. Regardless, he quite confidently and explicitly claims that it takes action to counter it.

And though the level of effort of the action itself might be objectively fixed, the thought of it, the perception, of it takes on weight. The mass itself is stable, but the holding onto it becomes cumbersome.  Like holding a bottle of water at an arm's length. The bottle itself does not change. But the degradation of the body's ability to support it inevitably results in discomfort, pain, or outright failure.

So, if there's something you've been wanting to do and haven't, whether you just don't feel like it or downright dread it, do it anyway. And see what happens.