today’s reverb10 prompt:
Beyond avoidance. What should you have done this year but didn’t because you were too scared, worried, unsure, busy or otherwise deterred from doing? (Bonus: Will you do it?)
For me, fear, worry, ambivalence, or busyness are not at all equivalent. Nor are they always forms of avoidance. There’s a critical tone to this prompt (in the word avoidance and in should) that sets my teeth on edge.
I, and most people I know, are really good at should-ing ourselves. No matter what we are doing, there’s a little critical voice saying “you should have written more” or “you should have run further” or “you should have gotten up earlier.”
If should worked as a motivational tool for personal growth, everyone I know would be wildly successful. But it doesn’t. Should drains our achievements and our power. Should holds us prisoner in a self-made cell located between the present moment and an impossible standard.
I was thumbing through Stephen Cope’s Yoga and the Quest for the True Self this morning and happened across a sentence that seemed relevant to these musings. Cope was discussing the reactions of students at Kripalu to a visiting meditation and yoga teacher whose philosophy was “there is absolutely nothing wrong with this moment.” As Cope explained, many of the Western students struggled with this teaching, because we are so immersed in what he calls “the false self” — a construction of who we think we should be.
If this moment is just fine, if there’s nothing wrong with it or us, maybe that can open up a gentle space for growing and goal-setting, rather than the harsh critical voice that speaks the shoulds.
Sure, there are things I thought I wanted to do during 2010 that I didn’t do. But there’s nothing wrong in this moment. Nothing wrong with me. Feeling not-wrong certainly gives me more energy for the future than focusing on all the ways I didn’t live up to some shoulds.
Moving beyond avoidance for me means moving beyond the language of should to the experience of acceptance.