Rusty Doors and Fairy Tales

Tate

Many times my most difficult time to process things I face feels like trying to open a rusty door. When I was young I learned from my environment to avoid tough places. We all want to take the easy road because it's comfortable, its known, it's acceptable socially. However to step outside the boundaries of what you have always known also open doors to dilemmas. When we step outside the norm it impunes others sedate lifestyles. Breakthrough usually is from something breaking. A habit, a way of thinking, how religion framed your thought life, deconstruction of old values to take on new ways to think and live. 

So often I have felt like many friends have disappeared socially when I step out of the norm to go big. Comments like "too many irons in the fire", "be very careful" etc... They seem to not want to be too close "when I go down or fail". However they cheer me on when they see success. There is a hardship to breaking patterns in our lifestyle. At 59 for instance my wife and i took on a 26 day detox program. The first week was awful. The food required to be consumed tasted toxic. Breaking old habits is hard, but necessary in order to see good results. 

I stumbled upon a storage room full of junk. I looked at it over and over again to develop a "what if vision" on how would this room look if it was reframed, repurposed into a thriving art studio. Pushing this rusty door of opportunity open required many hours of dedication, cleaning, emptying, deconstructing to get it to what I saw. Many challenges, many misunderstandings and many disappointments. It would have been a hell of a lot easier to just dream about it than to actually push my way through to a new future. 

The fairy tale part... A fairy tale is fiction, its fantasy, its for lore. It's is the way we see life until we push through the obstacles. A few months ago i published an article on the "art of push". Even the article offended some...

When your eyes get full of vision, your life gets full of passion you begin to walk on a super highway. Sleep is over rated, comfort zones become optional. Fear becomes a vanquished foe.  Unfortunately and that's a fricken big unfortunately at your express pace you walk among the "slow ones" let's call them "slows" for short. Have you been on an escalator or a people mover where people want to just ride like they are on a daycation! Your frantic voice in the inside is Dear God would your people just move! It is more fun to run on a people mover watching the walkers. It's like two different worlds. 

Our cultures traffic is myopic or narrow fixed in the temporary, where vision is only on today never tomorrow much less future. Apathy, laziness, and a boat load of complacency or the slow ones as I call it liter the path to success. So to the visionary who tries to function among the slows it's like "quick sand". Here is where the "art of push" comes in. Grace is good to a point, but after no returned phone calls or texts sometimes you need to pull out the "art of push".

Here is my prescription the visionary on the express lane of breakthrough. Apply grace toward people as you move forward, (excuse me sir/ mam I'm coming through) however as I am learning is most of the "slows" hate change because they have bitten the apple of personal comfort. "Slows" like to accuse there slowness on the altar of "I was busy". They like to form opinions about you in their secret groups like "I think that guy is crazy" or "something's gotten into him lately".

Steven Pressfield, author of The War of Art, writes:

“Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.” Highly creative people wake up every morning, fully aware of the need to grow and push themselves. But there is always the fear, resistance as Pressfield calls it, that they don’t have what it takes. No matter how successful the person, that fear never goes away. They simply learn to deal with it, or not.

Here is where you now apply the "art of push". Will they get offended heck yes they do! I have offended more people in the last 60 days than all of last year, so I push all the more. Nothing great was ever accomplished on the back side of lazy town. No rusty door of destiny was ever opened without some level of exertion. I doubt not one powerful invention ever came to be without the art of push. So visionary arm your self with a bucket of grace, throw caution to the wind and push till your vision becomes reality.

Cheers,

Tate