originally posted: Aug 14, 2019

You don’t have to want to do it. You only have to be willing.

A great thing happens when you follow through on a commitment, especially if you don’t want to as you do it. By sacrificing yourself a bit in the moment you don’t want to, you grow a bit. You make the decision that you can be there for something outside of yourself, in spite of your momentary desires or impulses, and thus you merge a bit with something seemingly outside of you. You challenge your limited idea of yourself. You expand beyond your boundaries and begin to find you’re more than you ever thought you were. You help make the show happen, whether by participating in it or being in its audience. You help a friend move, transitioning into a new life they couldn’t have made it into on their own. You somehow make something that in some way would have been less without you, and you are more because of it, too.

When you flake on a commitment, that is you don’t try mostly just because you don’t want to, rather than because circumstances are really so insurmountable, in that moment you protect yourself and at the same time you limit yourself. The excuse you make up makes up a false limitation that binds you. If we say we’ll meet a friend and then decide we don’t want to because it’s raining, then next time it rains we’ll be more likely to give up too because we have started to become the person that can’t go out in the rain. If instead we can overcome such circumstances, we grow into the people that can handle that challenge, and who knows which others, too.

But what should we commit to? So many requests, demands, interests, and impulses cross our path every day. Sometimes all at once! It’s not always easy to know what we truly want when “opportunities” present themselves. Are they in fact opportunities, or are they tests? Making a commitment is one way to find out.

Decision-making is always difficult. Alan Watts tells the story of a laborer who upon arriving to a farm, far exceeds the employer’s expectations completing each task faster than anyone ever before him, but quits after being given the task of having to sort, that is to decide, over and over which potatoes are ready to be sold and which aren’t. The experience of making a decision can be very draining, and so it behooves us to make a decision simply. Any decision, that is, even by flipping a coin if the options are that close, just so that we can get unstuck from the paralysis of decision-making and move on to following through with making the commitment. Afterall, we don’t really know whether a decision is right or wrong, good or bad, or something in between until we’re on the other side of that commitment, until the results are in. Then will the fruits of experience help us see matters more clearly. So what is more important in the process is going through with whatever we decide.

Decision-making may well be worth another post entirely, but in general it serves us well to reduce the scope of a commitment to something we can try out instead of giving in to typical all-or-nothing terms. One way to make commitments approachable is to give them a time limit. It’s easier to give up drinking for 60 days than for the rest of your life, no matter how evil you are convinced the habit may be. Not only will limiting the term of the commitment make it more likely that you’ll be able to go through with it, but it may also give you the chance to see what is going on without having to worry about whether you’ll be able to make an impossible demand.

I once knew a couple that decided to get married for just 3 years with the option to renew afterwards. The husband said that he was certain that being given the time limit helped a lot in reducing the existential angst that can arise as feelings and even the relationship itself changed over the course of the first three years. He was able to go through falling out of love with his partner, letting his romantic ideal of love give way and discover a more real and sustainable love on the other side of experience. I am to report that the couple have not only completed their first three year contract but have also decided to renew.

Alas, if you’re making a particularly challenging or meaningful commitment, it is likely going to teach you something. Finding a simple way to codify what you learn, perhaps by journaling periodically about the experience can help you to see from a bigger picture what the journey has been about. In this way commitments provide the basic structure to launching a journey of discovery, one which has the potential to reveal the deeper truths that we seek.

So take heart. Make a decision once, and then you’ll only make efforts to keep your commitment. This is a simple yet powerful recipe for growth. May it help you on your lifelong evolutionary journey =)