control:
She was a passenger on a bus. Bruce Springsteen was driving. Suddenly Springsteen pulled over, handed Carol the keys, and bolted. In the dream Carol was panicking. How could she drive this huge rolling Greyhound? By now all thepassengers were staring. Clearly no one else was gonna step forward and take charge. Carol took the wheel. To her amazement, she found she could handle it.
Later, analyzing the dream, she figured Bruce Springsteen was “The Boss.” The boss of her psyche. The bus was the vehicle of her life. The Boss was telling Carol it was time to take the wheel. More than that, the dream, by actually setting her down in the driver’s seat and letting her feel that she could control the vehicle on the road, was providing her with a simulator run, to prime her with the confidence that she could actually take command in her life.
A dream like that is real support. It’s a check you can cash when you sit down, alone, to do your work.
P.S. When your deeper Self delivers a dream like that, don’t talk about it. Don’t dilute its power. The dream is for you. It’s between you and your Muse. Shut up and use it.
The only exception is, you may share it with another comrade-in-arms, if sharing it will help or encourage that comrade in his or her own endeavors.
RESISTANCE AND RATIONALIZATION
----
Rationalization is Resistance’s right-hand man. Its job is to keep us from feeling the shame we would feel if we truly faced what cowards we are for not doing our work.
MICHAEL
Don’t knock rationalization. Where would we be without it? I don’t know anyone who can get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. They’re more important than sex.
SAM
Aw, come on! Nothing’s more important than sex.
MICHAEL
Oh yeah? Have you ever gone a week without a rationalization?
—Jeff Goldblum and Tom Berenger,
in Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill
But rationalization has its own sidekick. It’s that part of our psyche that actually believes what rationalization tells us.
It’s one thing to lie to ourselves. It’s another thing to believe it.
RESISTANCE AND
RATIONALIZATION,
PART TWO
----
Resistance is fear. But Resistance is too cunning to show itself naked in this form. Why? Because if Resistance lets us see clearly that our own fear is preventing us from doing our work, we may feel shame at this. And shame may drive us to act in the face of fear.
Resistance doesn’t want us to do this. So it brings in Rationalization. Rationalization is Resistance’s spin doctor. It’s Resistance’s way of hiding the Big Stick behind its back. Instead of showing us our fear (which might shame us and impel us to do our work), Resistance presents us with a series of plausible, rational justifications for why we shouldn’t do our work.
What’s particularly insidious about the rationalizations that Resistance presents to us is that a lot of them are true. They’re legitimate. Our wife may really be in her eighth month of pregnancy; she may in truth need us at home. Our department may really be instituting a changeover that will eat up hours of our time. Indeed it may make sense to put off finishing our dissertation, at least till after the baby’s born.
What Resistance leaves out, of course, is that all this means diddly. Tolstoy had thirteen kids and wrote War and Peace . Lance Armstrong had cancer and won the Tour de France three years and counting.
RESISTANCE CAN BE BEATEN
----
If Resistance couldn’t be beaten, there would be no Fifth Symphony, no Romeo and Juliet , no Golden Gate Bridge. Defeating Resistance is like giving birth. It seems absolutely impossible until you remember that women have been pulling it off successfully, with support and without, for fifty million years.
BOOK TWO
___________
COMBATING RESISTANCE
Turning Pro
It is one thing to study war
and
She was a passenger on a bus. Bruce Springsteen was driving. Suddenly Springsteen pulled over, handed Carol the keys, and bolted. In the dream Carol was panicking. How could she drive this huge rolling Greyhound? By now all thepassengers were staring. Clearly no one else was gonna step forward and take charge. Carol took the wheel. To her amazement, she found she could handle it.
Later, analyzing the dream, she figured Bruce Springsteen was “The Boss.” The boss of her psyche. The bus was the vehicle of her life. The Boss was telling Carol it was time to take the wheel. More than that, the dream, by actually setting her down in the driver’s seat and letting her feel that she could control the vehicle on the road, was providing her with a simulator run, to prime her with the confidence that she could actually take command in her life.
A dream like that is real support. It’s a check you can cash when you sit down, alone, to do your work.
P.S. When your deeper Self delivers a dream like that, don’t talk about it. Don’t dilute its power. The dream is for you. It’s between you and your Muse. Shut up and use it.
The only exception is, you may share it with another comrade-in-arms, if sharing it will help or encourage that comrade in his or her own endeavors.
RESISTANCE AND RATIONALIZATION
----
Rationalization is Resistance’s right-hand man. Its job is to keep us from feeling the shame we would feel if we truly faced what cowards we are for not doing our work.
MICHAEL
Don’t knock rationalization. Where would we be without it? I don’t know anyone who can get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. They’re more important than sex.
SAM
Aw, come on! Nothing’s more important than sex.
MICHAEL
Oh yeah? Have you ever gone a week without a rationalization?
—Jeff Goldblum and Tom Berenger,
in Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill
But rationalization has its own sidekick. It’s that part of our psyche that actually believes what rationalization tells us.
It’s one thing to lie to ourselves. It’s another thing to believe it.
RESISTANCE AND
RATIONALIZATION,
PART TWO
----
Resistance is fear. But Resistance is too cunning to show itself naked in this form. Why? Because if Resistance lets us see clearly that our own fear is preventing us from doing our work, we may feel shame at this. And shame may drive us to act in the face of fear.
Resistance doesn’t want us to do this. So it brings in Rationalization. Rationalization is Resistance’s spin doctor. It’s Resistance’s way of hiding the Big Stick behind its back. Instead of showing us our fear (which might shame us and impel us to do our work), Resistance presents us with a series of plausible, rational justifications for why we shouldn’t do our work.
What’s particularly insidious about the rationalizations that Resistance presents to us is that a lot of them are true. They’re legitimate. Our wife may really be in her eighth month of pregnancy; she may in truth need us at home. Our department may really be instituting a changeover that will eat up hours of our time. Indeed it may make sense to put off finishing our dissertation, at least till after the baby’s born.
What Resistance leaves out, of course, is that all this means diddly. Tolstoy had thirteen kids and wrote War and Peace . Lance Armstrong had cancer and won the Tour de France three years and counting.
RESISTANCE CAN BE BEATEN
----
If Resistance couldn’t be beaten, there would be no Fifth Symphony, no Romeo and Juliet , no Golden Gate Bridge. Defeating Resistance is like giving birth. It seems absolutely impossible until you remember that women have been pulling it off successfully, with support and without, for fifty million years.
BOOK TWO
___________
COMBATING RESISTANCE
Turning Pro
It is one thing to study war
and
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