You want to be free of the weight of who you were yesterday. Free from recreating the past in the present. You want freedom from limiting ideas about yourself and everyone else. You want to be free from your compulsive self-protection and need to please. Free from your paralyzing self-criticism and emotional ghosts. So, you use your addictions and isolation to protect yourself from the past. But, instead, you become a prisoner of it.
All your blame points to externals—other people, limited opportunity, hardships. You think you can’t find a purpose worthy of commitment. Your impossible standards guarantee you won’t. Expecting perfection is nothing more than a built-in alibi. It keeps dreams at bay, so you never have to risk loss. It keeps you separate from other people, goals, and life-altering decisions.
Doing whatever you want, whenever you want, promises a freedom it never delivers. On the surface, the idea of a total lack of structure or accountability seems worth aspiring to. The culture and your ego encourage and sell it to you. But, it’s a commitment that gives rise to the discipline that produces results. Only that to which you fully commit can support and fulfill you.
To refuse to show up, or to show up intermittently, for your life is to reject opportunity. You think evidence provides the rationale necessary to commit to something. But proof can’t exist before commitment. The belief that riskless decisions and knowable futures are possible is false. Commitment gives birth to the potential of decisions, relationships, and vocations.
Love can’t live, grow, and breathe under scrutiny, rationality, and indecision. In your attempt to maintain total security, the experience of real-life disappears. You end up with absolute independence but no love or meaningful work. You must commit to being alone or in a relationship. Pursuing a calling or playing it safe. There is no third choice, which is a relationship with total autonomy. Or a vocation without failure. If you want to be free, commit. That’s the order necessary to manifest dreams.
When you commit based on your judgment and intuition, you have a real shot at connecting to your purpose. You are already in, so you don’t have to subject yourself, others, or the goal to endless worthiness tests. You give something a shot by signing on in your heart first. In doing so, you commit to your greatest good. Motivation shows up. Decisions reinforce themselves with the results of action and follow-through.
Will you make the wrong choice and get hurt in life? Yes. Will you fail in public hundreds of times? Yes. Will the universe rise to meet and support you? Also, yes. If you keep yourself behind the lines of life to avoid stray bullets of rejection and loss, you lose life itself. True freedom is a full-stop commitment to something.
Song accompaniment: Genesis, Follow You Follow Me
Artwork: The Art of Seth
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