Motivation, inspiration, and faith.
These are these kind of feelings and states of mind that seem to be so central to trying to improve our lives.
If we don’t feel any motivation, and we don’t have any trust in what’s going to happen, then it’s very difficult to actually do anything that builds towards the future.
Without this kind of sense of motivation and this sense of faith or trust, it just seems like what’s the point of doing anything except whatever we feel like doing in the moment? And so this is a whole world of mindset shifts and new ways of looking at things, trying to get pumped up with this feeling of motivation, but motivation always fades away.
It never is something that lasts longer than a short time, because it’s just a temporary feeling.
So we’re always having to deal with these kind of ebbs and flows of motivation.
But somehow, we need to have more than- we need to have some kind of feeling that propels us forward.
Because just the feeling like “I should get better”, “I should improve my life”: without any kind of feeling supporting it, it’s so difficult to push through and get anything done beyond a very short time.
So in this series I look at this whole world of motivation and faith, and how we can think about this idea.
We can use various kinds of tricks of carrot and stick, trying to encourage ourselves to some kind of target we can move towards, and also something we can move away from, and that can keep us moving.
The hunger to achieve a desired future state, and the fear to avoid an undesired future state, and we can use these forces to push us along.
One of them being the fear of future regret, the feeling of regret of wasting life, wasting time.
That is a future regret feeling that can be helpful to push us towards using time usefully.
But eventually, motivation always disappears.
It always comes and goes, and it always goes away.
So the idea of faith is having a certain kind of trust in the universe, that somehow may not feel like it at the moment.
We may not really have that pumped-up, on-fire feeling, it may just feel like we’re just wasting time in the moment.
And yet there’s kind of a background sense that if I go forward with a certain kind of attitude, and keep going no matter what, that somehow good things will probably happen.
And that’s this kind of- you can use the word faith, or you can say trust.
You can say it’s in the universe, or it’s in life, or it’s in the future, or whatever.
But even though we don’t know the future, we can kind of gamble on it, and we can kind of guess that probably, if I keep doing this particular thing, if I stay on a path that I know is good, do things that I know are good, avoid things I know are bad, stay on this path, of course always making adjustments, but staying on a path even when I don’t really feel like it: this kind of belief that if I do this, my future is likely to be better.
Even though I can’t know for sure, it’s probably going to give me some kind of good future result.
And that can be what helps us to stay on a good path and continue making good changes and doing good work, even when the feeling goes away.
So I have this, just like anybody else, of course, sometimes I feel motivated and sometimes I just want to waste time, and it just doesn’t feel like there’s any point in doing anything.
This is always something that comes around, comes up, goes around up and down.
And so remembering this mindset of trust in the universe is something that helps me to stay focused when I just don’t feel like it.
And then, in the end, though, we don’t have any solutions for life.
There’s no solution, there’s no fix.
There’s lots of suggestions out there of, you know, what are the quick fixes for life.
But in the end, life, it seems, is not a problem that can be solved.
There’s no solution.
And going through life with this kind of uncertainty, we’ll always have that, and we’ll never really know exactly what causes what and what will result from what.
So there’s a certain kind of attitude of gambling, maybe, in a way.
Just with everything we do, we’re just trying our best and hoping for the best based on what we can guess about the way the world is.
And I wish I had a more clear answer to leave things on, but as far as I can see, that seems to be life.
We’re going through it in the dark, and we have some kind of guiding lights to help us through, but in the end, we just have to trust that we take a step and that it will move us where we want to go.
#motivation #inspiration #faith