Your Second Life Starts at the Resistance

Posted Thursday at 10:30 PM5 days

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Are you dreaming?

How often do you see yourself somewhere else?

Does it warm the center of you, even when you’re centered in a cold, dark world?

But more importantly…

How much closer are you than you were yesterday?

Last month?

Last year?

What if you knew exactly why your dream is still a dream?

Want to know the difficult part of this?

I realized that, while I’m more ‘in it’ than years before, I’m actually not tangibly closer.

What does that mean then?

Is it the unseeable progress…or is it no progress at all?

…

Sometimes…

Just sometimes…I can steal my attention away from what ‘needs to be done’, and into a state of mind that is a strictly objective reality.

It’s a new skill actually.

*proud pat on the butt*

A very inconsistent and frustrating one though.

But it has a great purpose.

It helps me fight The Resistance.

What that skill actually is:

It’s the literal ability to see what’s around me, without my mind wandering to financial stability, status, mental health, isolation, comparison to others, success — and focusing on my closest and most real environment.

It’s the size of my apartment, the feel of fabric on my skin, the silence of 6 a.m., the 100,000 pages of knowledge that sits on my bookshelf, the dim light of my living room lamp, the course feel of cheap carpet under my feet.

It’s using my eyes to see the world around me at it’s current state.

It’s attention separate from ‘seeking attention’.

What that skill does for me:

It gives me time, even if it’s just moments, completely separated from the existence of anything outside of my 500 square feet. My world collapses so quickly to a close proximity, that my mind can’t do anything but calm itself, and my soul ease into an acceptance.

It’s presence.

More than that, it’s control. Even if it’s just slight control.

It’s what I can control at the closest scale.

And that’s affirming of my capabilities.

In these moments, I have release from the existential pain and anxiety of a chaotic and modern world that so often is focused on something completely disconnected from what the real human experience is.

It helps me take a breath, regroup, and push forward.

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What is the Resistance?

It’s not my term.

It’s a coined term presented by Steven Pressfield in his book, “The War of Art”.

The amount of power I felt from his writing is monumental.

As he talks about The Resistance and what you have to do to face it, you realize that the most powerful thing that you’ll ever know within this one life.

You.

Have.

Control.

Not of the outer world, but the inner one.

And even more so, you have to take control.

The paradox is that, the more you control the inner world, the more the outer one changes by proxy.

And for most of us, our anxiety and pain is directly a result of a mind that thinks it is at the mercy of the world, not the other way around.

…

Your only enemy that matters is The Resistance.

*For the sake of not overusing a term that’s not mine, we’ll call The Resistance the “inner demon” from here forward.*

The inner demon is what keeps you in your warm bed. It’s what tells you to relax in front of the TV with some chocolate after a long day at work. It’s what tells you that weekends are a safe space for doing nothing and decompressing from a week of life you hate(I did this too).

And most importantly, it’s the voice that tells you that you have ‘all the time in the world’.

This might be the worst, most dangerous piece of advice you ever get.

From others and yourself.

…

Let me tell you something I learned from one of my role models:

Patience while taking action is key…but patience waiting for action to happen is the end of your beginning.

Be patiently impatient.

Act on your dreams.

If I’d only had good health insurance to help me pay for a therapist, my self-awareness and my sense of identity would be tenfold what it is right now.

But, I gave that up when I decided to move away from a large industrial company to be self-employed.

Regardless…

Conversation (therapist or best friend groups) and deep discussion of human understanding, perspective, dialogue and self-perception changes everything.

It may be the most undervalued influence to an individual’s success compared to anything else that moves a human forward in life.

Apart from the inner demon anyway.

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The hardest thing to accept is that the inner demon has nothing to do with anyone else.

It has nothing to do with what the world owes you, who traumatized you, or who stands in your way.

It has everything to do with how you assess and handle every situation you come across.

Action is God.

(Don’t worry, you don’t have to disaffiliate your religion to believe in action.)

But action, or lack thereof, is highly influenced by how we feel.

And how we feel is almost always the creation of the inner demon.

It’s the lie.

It’s the deception.

It’s the very manifestation that will lead you to not just an idle life, but a very gray and uneventful one.

That little f*ckin voice may be the downfall of your whole life.

God or no God…believe in that.

And your feels have been deciding things for you.

It’s the lack of matured emotional intelligence.

We feel too tired, too afraid, too intimidated, too stupid, too embarrassed, too unimportant to act.

It’s that simple.

Yet, it’s also the hardest thing you’ll ever do.

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Why?

Because the inner demon is created by your history, your experiences, your trauma, and your self-belief.

It’s complex and it’s unique to you.

That’s why life is so difficult.

We think that no one understands what we’re going through. We make victims of ourselves out of the assumption that our unique experience is impossible to understand, therefore impossible to work through.

The inner demon takes advantage of the weakest parts of you. Whether it’s bad practice, genetics, your vices, or your insecurities.

What’s easy for someone else may be nearly impossible for you.

But then, that also means…

What’s easy for you may be nearly impossible for someone else.

Self-judgement can rob you of optimism and clarity.

…

Your second life:

It starts when you see that you truly have control of the trajectory of your life.

It starts when you see that raw action is better than perfect planning.

It starts when you see that your personal narrative and perspective is more important than the external ones.

It starts when you see that your struggle has everything to do with how you talk to yourself.

It’s the greatest lies of the Resistance.

Your enemy isn’t the world.

Your enemy is yourself.

But it doesn’t have to be.

Truth and Love, Reader.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.