nothing to hang on to, no parachute
📍 Austin, TX
In February, I read Tony Robbins's famous Awaken the Giant Within.
The premise of his aptly titled book is that there is a giant inside each of us, and it is asleep. Our job is to wake it up. Opening the first page of the book, I already felt the concept a little self-critical. It reminded me I needed fixing and this was a reminder I didn't particularly want. And even if Tony was not saying I'm broken, he's at least suggesting the best bit of me is comatose and needs a good prod.
After finishing the book I wrote a list of the goals I wanted to achieve in life. It was a long list. I shortened the list to those for 2025, so about eight items (still a lot). I then turned them into a visualisation and sat visualising them every morning. I would get up early, creep into the sitting room, and visualise abundant success.
Strangely, this activity did not make me happy at all.
Actually it stressed me out. It made me increasingly uncomfortable that I was a fucking long way away from these 'stretch goals'. And days would skip by — then weeks — and I'd not be any closer to summiting these bloody goals. By not achieving them, I was failing at them every day! By being so bold, these goals were mutually exclusive, too — impossible to achieve together. Still, this didn't stop me sitting on our comfy white linen sofa with a cup of tea and visualising aggressively every day until veins showed up on my forehead.
I was setting myself up to fail. I felt like a failure!
For some reason, I wanted so badly to manifest a different future that I had forgotten what magic had brought me to living with my beautiful partner in our beautiful flat in Geneva. (Hint: It wasn't goal setting.)
After some time, I showed some people closest to me these goals. They took a cursory glance and, almost with pity, said:
“Look, Hec, this doesn't sound very self-compassionate. Why don’t you put this list in the bin and go for a walk.”
Suddenly, in a mighty cosmic flash, the vapidity of these goals shone bright in my face. I realised that this was all very self-critical! I trashed the list. I burned it in a fire ceremony.
Because even after all of the joy of travel, I was only giving myself permission to be fulfilled if I achieved these fantasy goals. And only then, with achievements pinned to my wall, would I be happy. The list told me with absolute sincerity that I didn't deserve to be happy today: I had to wait for contentment (with a sub-3 hour marathon and a $1m bootstrapped business and on and on).
What a joke.
At the time, I listened to a short meditation, and the teacher pointed out that everything I had ever achieved was not with me in this moment. It was all a memory. Every ounce of hard work, every newsletter even, every qualification, business success, or even my cycle adventure was all in the past, as inaccessible as last night’s dream.
And, so this meditation went, impermanence will happen to all of my future goals, too!
Damn it.
Moreover, this list of goals (and my holding on to them) presumes I know what is best for myself. It is as if I have some omniscient powers to predict my own Eden and foretell the exact position of the Gates of Heaven.
Well, I don't have that gift. Nothing I have ever wanted to happen has happened as I had hoped.
And thank god for those disappointments!
Because if thinks had worked to plan, I would be living a different life. At one point, when I was 15 I wanted to join the army. I'm happy I didn't, I wouldn’t have fitted. At another time, I tried to build retirement homes in north Norfolk (when I was 24). I wouldn't be writing to you from Austin if that idea had materialised.
Moreover, I hardly need to note that I never asked for the Big Bang to explode our solar system into existence. I never manifested for a perfectly balanced atmosphere, plentiful water, the Thames Water system of unleaded pipes, the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, or the dinosaurs who died to become coal lumps that fed the electric heaters that baked the millions of Kellogg's Cornflakes I had for breakfast which grew me into an adult.
My day today depends so many wild happenings beyond my control, none of which were ever on my list of goals. (That would be SUUUCH A LONG LIST!) So, given this fact, it's kind of mad to think I should have a long list of future goals in the first place.
Life unfolds in odd and unpredictable ways.
We wouldn't want to know the future or predict its unfolding. It would be dull.
From the outside, it appears that people who are able to predict the future with greater accuracy than others have better lives. Certainly, if you can predict the stock market, you will beat the markets.
But what if we realised nobody can predict the future with extra-special accuracy?
Instead, I now think life rewards people with good systems (that exist in the present moment) rather than big goals (which are future-bound and inaccessible, and remind us of our delinquency). A goal might be to meet your life partner. A system would be to approach every interaction with an open curiosity so that it's obvious when the right person comes along. A goal might be to run an enormous business. A system would be to do something that is important and which you are good at today.
So, what to do? Well, it's simple when we think about it in terms of systems. We have to be with what is and trust that whatever happens is not really up to us at all. Things will unfold; that's basically all that can be said.
“The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute.
The good news is there is no ground.”
— Chogyam Trungpa
I started reading this and thought, why am I sitting here and not travelling the world. By the time I had finished reading, I had decided that there were other ways of looking at it. However, i have booked a flight to London for next month, something that has been on my mind for ages.
I love your writing, Hector.
Love this! 🙏