Lean into the pain
Nov. 12th, 2012 12:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackSomeone linked to this a couple of months ago, but it really resonated with me. It's from the Lean into the Pain entry in Aaron Swartz's Raw Nerve series.
My interpretation wasn't quite the same, but the way I put it was an analogy to an occasional trope in fantasy or sci-fi novels, where something is psychically exerting a feeling of fear or pain onto the protagonist to drive them away from something, who realises what's happening, and that by moving towards where the pain is greatest, they can actually use the pain as a compass to tell them where to go.
Similarly, my brain often generates a "don't think about this, it'll be scary!" feeling about something I need to do but have been putting off. If I listen to the scary voice, I can end up not doing it.
But the voice is actually really, really useful as a way of highlighting those things you need to do, and once you've learned that most of the time, the things you've been putting off are not that bad (or at least, it's a relief to start dealing with them rather than let them get worse), that feeling is a really useful guide to what I should try to do next.
My interpretation wasn't quite the same, but the way I put it was an analogy to an occasional trope in fantasy or sci-fi novels, where something is psychically exerting a feeling of fear or pain onto the protagonist to drive them away from something, who realises what's happening, and that by moving towards where the pain is greatest, they can actually use the pain as a compass to tell them where to go.
Similarly, my brain often generates a "don't think about this, it'll be scary!" feeling about something I need to do but have been putting off. If I listen to the scary voice, I can end up not doing it.
But the voice is actually really, really useful as a way of highlighting those things you need to do, and once you've learned that most of the time, the things you've been putting off are not that bad (or at least, it's a relief to start dealing with them rather than let them get worse), that feeling is a really useful guide to what I should try to do next.
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Date: 2012-11-13 07:13 pm (UTC)I rather like that :) The voice is definitely useful for highlighting things that need to be dealt with.
I tend to find that they're not all things I need to do, they're a mixture of things I need to bite the bullet and do and things I need to own up to myself that "I won't be able to do that [now] because [time/money/stress/energy/other priorities/etc]". Deciding what *not* to do at any given time is really really important (I find) because e.g. "there are people on this planet who don't have clean water, you are in the top 10% wealthiest people in the world, you should really do something about that" is both true and immensely psychically exhausting/paralysing.
no subject
Date: 2012-11-14 04:31 pm (UTC)Yeah, sometimes the desired action is "decide to officially drop this" (even though that can be less trivial than it sounds).
You're very right, narrowing down what NOT to waste time on, I often have an official "these ideas keep coming back but they're not worth the time at the moment" list of things NOT to do, to stop them from cropping up on todo lists :)