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Most people—myself included—won’t pursue their passions or callings until the fear of doing so is finally exceeded by the pain of not doing so, though it's tragic how high a threshold we have for this quality of pain. But when this happens, logic alone should tell you that you have to apply a little bit of cowboy wisdom: when your horse dies, get off!
As Redd Foxx once said, “Heroes are not born. They’re cornered.”
Phase One of responding to the passions and petitions that exude from our own souls—to any calls really—is typically ignoring them. Let this cup pass from me etc. An acquaintance of mine summed it by saying, “You shall know the truth and it shall make you nap.”
The theme of the sleeper, in fact, and the sleep that precedes awakening, is age-old in the heroic journey-tales of the world: Rip Van Winkle, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Brunhild in her magic slumber, the Hindu king Muchukunda who slept until brought around by Krishna, and Jonah fast asleep in the bottom of his boat.
If your resistance doesn’t take the form of outright refusal—whether it’s a quiet withdrawal from life or an obstinate stomp on the ground—then it often puts you into a state of suspended animation, a kind of emotional agnosticism in which you neither confirm nor deny the passion, but live in a netherworld of maybes; an infernal indecision that can steal decades from your life.
Rather than confront and act on the longings you feel, and the conniptions of change that often ensue, you're tempted to simply tune out, denial generally being the endorphin of choice. Maybe it's not that you really forget your passions, but that the fear of what might be demanded of you in pursuing them blocks you from acknowledging that you know what they are, and have always known. Maybe you fear not just what will be required of you, but fear the hope that such passions evoke, and the power that you know is dammed up behind your resistance.
Furthermore, the human psyche is like the Earth: it’s a closed system in the sense that there’s no away as in running away. There's no out as in throwing the garbage out. There’s no trash icon. Whatever you push down is just going to come up someplace else. As a Mexican poet named Jose Frias once said, “I tried to drown my sorrows with drink, but the damn things learned how to swim.”
Moving past the initial phase of resistance requires first and foremost that you acknowledge it's happening, and identify what form it's taking, because whatever you resist—and then refuse to look at—will tend to lodge itself between your intentions and your achievements, and you’ll constantly stumble there. We love talking about “wholeness” (holistic health, holistic business practices, holistic lifestyles and relationships), but we conveniently forget that wholeness requires taking into account the whole of a thing, including the parts we’d rather not look at. But you can’t create wholeness while cutting out part of the being that’s being called.
To help you identify your own habits of resistance, below is a list of half-a-dozen of the more common strategies people use to resist their passions, powers and potentials:
1) Hiding behind the tasks of discernment. In other words, studying your passions or callings to death. After all, there’s always one more angle to consider, one more expert to consult, one more class to take, one more skill to build, one more month or year until you're really ready. I remember a New Yorker cartoon showing a man standing at a crossroads, with two signs in front of him. One said, “To heaven.” The other said, “Workshops on how to get to heaven.”
2) Waiting for The Perfect Moment to act. Just the right combination of timing/money/education/energy/kids are finally grown up and out of the house/the stars are aligned just so. A public speaker named Rosita Perez once remarked that “for most people, the refrain goes, 'It’s 1 for the money, 2 for the show, 3 to get ready, 3 to get ready, 3 to get ready……' ”
3) Choosing a path that’s parallel to the one you actually feel called toward. Close enough to keep an eye on it, but not so close you’re tempted to jump tracks. So you become an art critic rather than an artist, a talent agent rather than a performer, an editor rather than a writer, a schoolteacher rather than a parent, a reporter rather than a novelist.
4) Self-sabotage. Some way you flip the circuit breaker when you have too much juice running through your system, or you’re a little too close to the proverbial flame, the one the moth goes around. One of my old favorites was blurting out some newfound enthusiasm to my most cynical family member. I might as well have just disemboweled myself on the spot, because what typically happened was that the cynic did what cynics do, pointing out all the problems and obstacles, and asking all those devil's-advocate questions that tend to be a little heavy on the devil and a little light on the advocate. And I ended up feeling angry and unsupported when I probably should have known better, given that I was raised by that person.
5) Workaholism. This is such a perfect disguise in some ways, because it’s one of our very few socially-sanctioned addictions. It may be just a way of going to sleep in the bottom of the boat, of keeping yourself so busy and distracted that you ignore something that’s hankering for your attention, but the beauty of this tactic is that you can put it on your resume. You can’t do that with most addictions.
6) Playing sour-grapes. Believing, for instance, that you’re going to fail at a certain endeavor, or suffer unduly for it, and so trying to convince yourself that you don’t really want it anyway. Say you’re called toward some vocation you feel unqualified for. You might tell yourself that the job you have now isn’t so bad, and at least you have a job, and besides work isn’t everything. Or maybe you feel the yearning to have a child, but you’re afraid of becoming the kind of parent your parents were, so you tell yourself that the world doesn’t need any more children. “The danger,” Simone Weil once said, “is not that the soul should doubt whether there's any bread, but that, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it's not hungry.”
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