Finding Strength Through Fatigue, and Clarity & Joy Through Confusion

Tired? Good, that means you are pushing yourself. It means you’re discovering your limits. Your boundaries. Your max out. This is an opportunity of self-discovery. When you are tired, you have discovered a boundary to overcome in the future. It also means that you have put in work and are striving towards achieving your goals, whether you’re tired during an exercise routine, during work, school, a creative pursuit, or anything really. This is a boundary you can take solace in knowing that you have climbed to the peak of, like climbing a mountain. This is a max that you an set the goal to push passed next time.

Are you tired after those 6 reps? Next time put on another 2.5 lbs. on each side. Tired after reading 20 pages in 30 minutes? Good, maintain that rate of productivity for a week and then next week read 21 pages in 30 minutes.

You do not have to keep pushing yourself either if that is not the term you have set for yourself. You may take days off. You can become content. But do this if it is what you really want to do. Take a break or simply maintain your gains because you are motivated by accomplishment of your positive desire not because you are motivated by your avoidance of your negative fear. In other words, are you resting because you are a made man and you have slayed the dragon, or are you resting because you are making excuses, turning your back on your quest to go lay in the shade? This is something only you can answer for yourself — be honest with yourself.

Along the journey of self-discovery and actualization, you will probably go through a state of confusion and fear — a crisis if you will. You may not know where to go or what to do. But you don’t have to know everything all at once. All you have to know is that you want to know yourself, and go from there. Look around you, and look at your options. What do you want to achieve in this life? Is it realistic? Think about some logical, strategic planning that will allow you to get to where you are going. For example, if you want to make $100K+ per year, then you’ll have to start looking into different careers. Then, you’ll have to start planning where to go to college, what to major in, how you are going to pay for it and so on.

There are many variables to consider. It helps to talk to someone you trust and write about this as you progress. You may feel anxious during this process and that’s normal since this is a big deal — this is your life we’re talking about. But there will be moments where you start to feel little twinkles of clarity, little sparks within the darkness and murkiness of the confusion. For example, you may know for a fact that you do not want to work with people. Or you may know for a fact that you do not want to do something mathematics related. This allows you to start narrowing down your options. By knowing what you don’t want to do, you are one step closer to knowing what you want to do.

Next, it’ll be helpful to consider how different possibilities make you feel. A lot of the time, especially these days in our hyper-logical, scientific-materialistic Western culture, we allow our heads to rule our hearts. This is a trap. What excites you? Does anything excite you? There are so many things to be excited about — it could literally be any subject matter. You can make money doing anything. Wealth is a mindset and a lifestyle. You must be open to the possibility that what excites you is possible to pursue as a career, and that you are worthy of pursuing it, that you matter enough to pursue it.

Maybe you have always had a passion for dogs or animals. Have you considered becoming a veterinarian? Or perhaps you have always been fascinated by physical space, and what it is. Have you considered going into physics or the metaphysics in philosophy? You have to be willing to make sacrifices to achieve you’re dreams. It may take years and hundreds of thousands of dollars for you to achieve this. But at some point you must decide that your dreams are worth pursuing, that you are worth caring about and supporting. That you love yourself enough to believe in yourself, even if your dream is far fetched or if it doesn’t fit in with your cultural or familial expectations. As 16th century French philosopher Michael de Montaigne said, “fame and happiness cannot be bedfellows.” The point here is that if you want to be happy, you must commit to doing what you know in your heart — what your intuition tells you — is best for you. And if you don’t know what that is yet, that’s okay. Like I said before, if you don’t know what you want to do, that’s part of the fun because it’s like you’re in sandbox mode in a video game: you get to experiment and build.
And that reminds me that it is about the journey, not the destination. Enjoy the process of exploring — that is key to the growth process. We as humans are constantly either growing, maintaining, or atrophying/declining. Learn to enjoy the process as it unfolds. Patience will allow you to find joy in the moments and stages of life in which you’re developing and building the foundation for the rest of your life. Learning to just sit in a moment and be in a moment without desire, with an empty mind, free of or mostly free of desire for what you want will give you everything you need.

And that is another paradox. Funny how I keep running into paradoxes. Life is a paradox. We are paradoxes. We are paradoxes because we are life. For the duality/polarity/separation between the individual mind (ego, the self) and the rest of life, of the rest of reality and the external, is but an illusion. As we learn more about and be ourselves more, and as we become more aware of and conscious of ourselves, we become more aware of life. The deeper we go into ourselves, into the internal, world within, eventually our inquiries, examinations, experiences, and experiments with pass the inflection point separating the duality of the internal and the external, and we will ‘pop out’ on the other side in the external. Through knowing ourselves, we come to know life, and through being ourselves, we come to be one with all of life, existence, and reality. This is a possibility for you. Do not believe me. Verify this for yourself through various self-development practices. For the enemy of Truth and thus happiness and joy is rigid attachment in all forms, including the form of blindly believing an other (in this case me) without deriving the Truth for yourself. You must learn to see and be for and through yourself, no one else, for there is no one else, and there is no one except One.