Taking care of our stories

If we want to take on responsibility for our stories, the first and crucial step is to become more aware of our mostly unconscious monologues. It is best to establish a culture of continuous inventory of our inner narratives.

To do this, we can use different possibilities.

Meditation without an object, in which we focus on breathing and posture without external guidance, is one of the most direct and uncomfortable means of inventory we can choose.

Close to meditation, we find the option to write. Creative formats can make sense because they allow a metaphorical approach to topics similar to hypnotherapy. But for our context here, I recommend a free kind of journaling, as known from Julian Cameron’s “The Way of the Artist” in form of morning pages. Even better suited is Proprioceptive Writing, an approach in which we attend to our thinking and document it in writing at the same time.

The last and smoothest version of establishing a thought inventory in our lives is the variant that thinkers, philosophers, and scientists of all time have used: strolling in silence and alone. The introvert often feels particularly comfortable in nature. For the extrovert, the pedestrian zones and parks of the city are recommended. Of all three mentioned approaches this one is the easiest to implement in our daily structure.

Once we become aware of our stories, we can start working with them in different ways

We can take care of self-limitation, self-devaluation, and hidden potentials in our stories.

We can start to take account of our achievements and successes, where we previously attributed them to coincidence or the work of others. We can cultivate self-love and positive self-talk.

Starting from problems and challenges, we can develop stories of a desired future and use them as leitmotifs for our current actions.

Do your care for a little, ugly story?

I promised counter-intuitive approaches. Let’s start with procrastination. Procrastination enjoys such great attention in the field of motivation that I felt compelled to take up the cliché at the beginning of this course. The common-sense story fits pretty well with the persiflage I developed at the beginning.

We postpone things. Not because there are good reasons to take care of that stuff later. No, we do it because we supposedly suffer from character weaknesses, have no willpower, and are unpredictable and unreliable slobs. And if our fellow human beings do not confront us with these “pearls of wisdom”, then we go on the hunt ourselves. We will certainly find what we are looking for on the Internet.

And because fear is always super effective when it comes to selling something, we also find clues on relevant blogs on how we can prevent our life success with our procrastination and offend the people we really care about. We usually find a few problem-oriented approaches to what is actually going on with us. Maybe even a few superficial solutions.

But in the end, it most often ends with something along the lines: “Turn over the cash. Because now you are dealing with the number one expert on the internet. And I will get you out of your misery.”

Fancy a sweet, little twist on this story?

How about an alternative story that you can use as a free shortcut? Among us: You may have fooled yourself. Procrastination may be useful in many cases and meaningful in even more.

Maybe you don’t perish because of procrastination. Maybe your depressive moods have nothing to do with it (a little hint here: Positive disintegration… Just google).

May I present the counter-intuitive alternative story? Drum roll please: Here comes positive procrastination.

No one tells you. They do not know. They love to regurgitate. They like to bathe in the comforting bath of common sense until not only their skin, but also their brain shrivels. First and foremost, the oh-so-great experts.

But I’ll tell you. And it doesn’t cost you anything: there are great and important reasons to take care of some stuff later than planned!

Life is an ambiguous, meandering, and incomprehensible something. Our planning efforts and our attempt to get a grip on life are understandable. But the ambition, with which we go about things when it comes to planning is more occupied with our longing for security, than the reality of our life.

We could dive very deep and correlate the waterfall model in software development with modern, agile project management approaches. But that goes beyond the scope of this course. If you are interested, then I recommend a short Internet research on this.

John Lennon or someone else put it in a simple denominator: “Life is what happens while we make other plans.”

And what do we do, in view of our planning chaos and our delays during operations? We stand before our inner court and are found guilty by judges and the jury. We planned. We were wrong. Off to the penal camp of our inner Siberia. We take the punishment upon ourselves. We betray our reality. We betray our hearts. We remain loyal to the plans, to cognition, and the harbor of the enlightened educated middle class. Ouch!

What we tend to overlook in our ambitious planning

Sure, there’s the Chronos. The measurable time with which we like to put ourselves and others on a leash. The dominant time concept of modernity, with which we put ourselves under pressure: on the highway, while we are queuing in the supermarket, or in front of the computer on our oh-so-important projects.

But the ancient Greeks know another concept of time, which we hardly know anymore as people who have thrown every sense of the more intuitive and spiritual aspects of our reality overboard with the Age of Enlightenment. Kairos is not measurable. In a way, it is outside the measurable time. And yet it is about the decisive moments in life. Because Kairos is about acting at the right moment.

Whether it can be explained or not…

We can force things and then we pay heavily for them. It takes longer. We need to devote more resources. We are having an accident. Or we fail extensively. But if we cultivate our sense of acting in the right moment, if we omit the inner subtext of procrastination, then we might be able to act at the right moment.

With rationality, we may judge this moment as late. Others may look at us with raised eyebrows, disdain, or impatience. But we can feel it: Now it just flows. We have no idea what is happening. The paper writes itself. The kitchen cleans up by itself. The car drives to the supermarket and something does the shopping effortlessly.

We don’t do what’s happening. Things take care of themselves, so to speak. The Chinese speak of Wu-Wei: non-acting. But we don’t care.

When it comes to creative, complex, or existential processes, we can feel the same way

Our self-devaluation may be massive. Others may look at us with suspicion from the side or from above. But we can feel it here too.

It was important to wait. It was important to plague ourselves with ourselves. It was important to take the supposed detours. At an earlier moment, it would not have been possible. It had to mature. Now, epiphany strikes with inspiring and liberating power.

Existential invitations

Sometimes we don’t realize it while planning: there are important things that we overlook. Sometimes it’s about vital things. Often it is about things that are crucial for our salvation, our health, and our existential development.

They sabotage our plans. They lead us to supposed deviations. They take us to the devil’s kitchen. We overlook these things because we want to avoid existential invitations. We don’t schedule those invitations because we don’t steer clear of them. We are afraid. And we’ll come back to that in a moment.

But life doesn’t let you haggle with itself. Life does not go along with our self-indulgence. It calls us. And, if we refuse, then it will start to hurt.

We have planned. And now we neglect the supposedly important thing, which is existentially a minor matter and a distraction. We may get into trouble. We may have to pay fiercely for it. But life leads us on a different path.

This way frees us. This path makes us whole. This path releases us from our illusions, our wrong answers, and our self-betrayal.

Viewed from the outside, from the point of view of reason, viewed through the eyes of the model citizens, it looks like distraction and procrastination. But, if we look with the heart, then we can see it: we refuse the seductions, the secondary things, and our pursuit of security.

On these bottomless grounds, which are the foundation of our liveliness and the source of our life force, we dare to dance. This may remind you of St. Exupéry and his Little Prince : “We only see well with the heart. The essential is invisible to the eyes (and the head).”

That was a story about procrastination that we revised

There are thousands of such stories living within us. From our taken perspective, each of these stories seems like a mental fortress in which we hide and entrench ourselves from the invitations of life.

From a different, more spiritually and existentially courageous perspective, these stories are gates. With these gates, we open access to a deeply livable life in which we gradually uncover our true essence.

One thing is likely: if we set out to work with our inner stories, then we will sooner or later get on the trail of Trojan development invitations…