a note
With all that is (always) going on in the world, including the genocide of and efforts for liberation of Palestinians, it feels irresponsible in some ways to write about something not completely related to processing these specific griefs and hopes.
Yet, sustainability is often about balancing the journeys we are on. One of the journeys I’ve been hearing call out to me loudly, repeatedly, on my own path and the path of others, is that of our relationship with the false idol of achievement. It cries to me to be spoken of.
As we navigate the shifting, contradicting, and harmonizing focal points that call us to awareness any given moment, I allow myself to write about something that feels profoundly relevant in this moment, even if it is not directly about nationalism, liberation, & genocide.
However, towards the end of this piece, I do connect it all.
Because all is connected.
Always.
In love & light
Achievement is a false god.
He doesn’t even really exist.
We use him the wrong way, always trying to reach him, touch him, hold him, acquire him as a lover, or worse yet: something to be conquered.
The trickster nature of the truth is this: there’s never a way to truly reach or experience achievement.
In reality, it is all the micro-actions before and after the split second of “achievement” that composite the god we imagine. Yet, instead of living and breathing inside of the micro-movements of life, we reach and reach for the silhouette that forms in the shadow of this movement.
As we make our way towards the destination of ‘achievement,’ we experience the true nature of life. We experience the digging of the hole, the planting of the tree, the tasting of the bread, the resonance of the conversation, the inhale of the breath, the light of insight, the creation of a fragment of art.
The god that we long for actually lives in the micro-movements of each day.
She lives in the doing and the being of it all.
example
Let’s take the example of writing a book. You long to write and publish a successful book.
In this case, you may think you long for the moment the book is accepted by the publisher, or the moment the book is put on shelves, or the moment you hit a certain number of pre-orders, or perhaps even the moment you finish a successful, media-filled book tour. Perhaps you think you long for the first royalty check that hits your bank account.
The moment(s) you long for -- let’s say, the benchmark of hitting of one quadrillion pre-orders -- barely exists. It is a manifestation of the mind to imagine the people who have purchased the book. You can not hug, converse, or resonate with each of the numbers, who represent people, that bought your book. It is a conceptual understanding that fills you with pride for a fleeting blip. The next moment, you are eating dinner, brushing your teeth, and waking up again the next day. The hugs you receive, the party you hold to celebrate with friends, the peaceful dreams you experience that night, get closer to what the “thing” is that you long for than the benchmark itself. In reality, was the benchmark actually a loving hug from your closest friend, one filled with second-hand pride, joy, and recognition?
Soon, the tour will be over (exhausting, it was), the emails will stop coming in, and the rollercoaster ride will come to an end. You will be back alone again, with your daily thoughts and torments, with no one to tell you how brilliant you are every five minutes.
Time to write another book? All of the validation that pumped you up, the praise that confirmed your excellence -- where does it go? Does it sustain you with a fluttering warmth for months and years on end? Or does it fizzle into the ether, waiting for the next fleeting high?
The emails and letters that came in, sharing how profoundly you influenced and positively affected readers’ lives feel full, and beautiful, and warming. That feels closer to the truth of achievement. But the resonance of deep relationship, of watching people’s lives change, isn’t there. The warming is sweet and fleeting.
What exactly was the book? What was the achievement? Where did the nature of shift, of experience, of fulfillment and wholeness really flood in?
You look back.
You see that for years, the book was the rhythm you set of waking up at the same time every morning to drink tea and write pages. It was the sound of the birds that greeted you as fresh coffee wafted its scent around the room and you sat down at your desk. It was the sound of rain that pattered against your window as you settled into the hum of typing.
It was the experience of insight that came as you developed a new character, or a new idea. It was the fascination and joy that bubbled inside your sternum as you developed an intriguing plot point.
It was the relationships you deepened as you excitedly discussed thoughts from new passages with friends and partners by a fire. It was the people you helped with the ideas that you were building out, sharing them bit by bit.
It was the struggle as you faced off with the blocks of creation - self-doubt, hopelessness, numbness. It was consciousness of the breaths you took as you looked for something inside of yourself.
It was the ideas and stories flowing through your mind, whispering jitters waiting to be told.
It was the channel of wisdom and creativity that moved through your body and onto a page, alchemizing energy into earthly material creation.
The nourishing fruit of ‘achievement’ was the embodiment of soul purpose through the micro-actions of living as a conscious human in a human body on earth.
It was the beingness of breath and creation, in the present moment.
The nourishing fruit of ‘achievement’ was the embodiment of soul purpose through the micro-actions of living as a conscious human in a human body on earth.
achievement as container
I think that to use achievement correctly, it is better to see it not as a god, but instead as a container that sets the parameters for the reality we inhabit as we set about along a path.
Without a reality-holding container, humans tend to feel lost, bereft, purposeless, amorphous, and despairing. Without a direction to walk in, time feels empty (not in the profound Buddhist way) and forgotten.
With limits on the section of woods we are walking in, with a destination at the top of the mountain, we can make our way through the infinite woods, pausing, touching slugs, smelling the breeze, tasting mushrooms, with a sense of peace.
Humans have a magnetic pull towards the sensation & perception of forward-movement, momentum, process, and growth. There is a feeling of hunger for growth, learning, and accumulation (of wisdom, of natural abundance, of connections (human and nonhuman)). This compulsion, at least to me, feels pure and good and necessary and deeply rooted in our design.
Achievement allows us to create a container that has the ideal conditions of what we perceive as forward movement. However, if we see the achievement, the thing we are reaching for, as the true goal, then we lose everything. We grasp for the feel of a ghost.
When we grasp for the ghost of achievement, our spirits tremble or power down with anxiety, depression, numbness, or despair. Our spirits seek, fervently, the satisfaction of pursuit. When we pursue something that doesn’t exist, we torture our spirits, like cats chasing after laser pointers.
When we grasp for the ghost of achievement, our spirits tremble or power down with anxiety, depression, numbness, or despair. Our spirits seek, fervently, the satisfaction of pursuit. When we pursue something that doesn’t exist, we torture our spirits, like cats chasing after laser pointers.
The pursuit to feel, the pursuit to be, the pursuit to open and shift and contribute; all of these are part of our purpose. The millions of micro-actions that lead up to the fulfillment of these pursuits constitute a life.
If we see achievement as the spine of the body, the major pole holding up a tent, we can interact with it in ways that feed us rather than diminish us. The pole holds the space for the magic that happens within the tent. The spine holds the body upright, allowing for movement and experience and sensation and interaction with this realm. These metaphors aren’t perfect because the pole really exists, as does the spine, and achievement does not. But the holder of the space analogy is effective.
If the container does not properly hold space for the magic to happen, then change the container.
But do be careful when you shift your focus to changing the container. Sometimes, because we become so focused on the container, we forget it isn’t real, and we torture ourselves daily for not maintaining the “perfect” container.
We liberate ourselves on our lack of speed, or our lack of quality, or our lack of perfection in hitting our conjured benchmarks for the success of the container. Sometimes we torture ourselves because our perfection of the container hasn’t led to fulfillment, or self-love, or deep peace and satisfaction. Sometimes we torture ourselves because our container isn’t as big or flashy as someone else’s.
All of this completely misses the point.
You are alive for a microscopic, indiscernible blip on the scale of geologic time (not to mention cosmic time). You were recently born, and you will soon die.
Your achievements do not matter.
I am sorry to say this again, but: your achievements do not matter.
I felt like you may not have heard me, or perhaps cannot. Because this is radical, and perhaps too Buddhist or something for Western thought. Perhaps when I say it this way, it depresses you, you feel resistance. I do. I invite you, however, to toy with it. Invite it in and let it stay for a couple of weeks. See how this guest makes you feel.
the life inside the container
Your achievements do not matter.
What matters is the way you lived your human life. The way you alchemized the regenerative energy of the planet. The way you perceived, experienced, grew, and felt. The way you loved.
You may be a musician who achieved ultimate success: fame, record deals, tours, accolades. We have all learned, again and again, that achievement alone does not stop the musician from wanting to die.
We feel attached to outcome over process.
That’s a trick.
It’s all a process.
If we settle into the beingness of the everyday, while holding achievement in our mind’s eye as the structure creating conditions for movement, then we can celebrate and feel full in the true reality of the human experience: micro-actions.
connections to everything;
current events, macro-level
The creation of Israel was a traditional understanding of achievement: I seek a benchmark that I imagine will create a feeling of success, peace, control, and safety for myself and my family. I will create a container where all of these conditions are not only possible, but guaranteed.
In this case, the container was determined to be a land, with borders, where we could control everything around us with such precision that no one could ever hurt us or touch what we had made ever again.
In this traditional fixation on the false idol of achievement, zionism forgot (a gentle verb) about the micro-movements of beingness. What micro-movements compose the energetic space of this container? What does this container of achievement ask for in order to maintain its shape?
What are the daily movements involved in creating an ethnicity and religion based country where other people already live?
Some of the daily movements: Kicking people living out of their houses. Bulldozing villages. Categorizing people into black-and-white distinctive castes. Creating checkpoints and barriers. Building walls. Maiming and killing non-Jewish people with guns. With bombs. With chemicals. Displacing non-Jewish people to refugee camps, to open air hostage cities. Every Israeli conscripted to the army within a certain age range. The micro-actions that come with this are pushing, shoving, shooting, bombing, harassing, lying, manipulating, and justifying.
The achievement does not exist. Only the micro-actions do.
Israel as a place of success, peace, and safety does not exist. Those were the alleged goals, but goals do not exist. Only the beingness and the micro-actions exist.
The beingness and micro-actions shape the container, in the end.
The beingness and actions of the zionist project shaped the container into a brutal, manipulative, apartheid regime that is so scared of its own nature and so fragile under the gaze of critique that anyone who speaks up for Palestinians or questions the nature and shape of the container is called anti-semetic, or self-hating.
What would a container look like that holds micro-actions that create the material conditions of peace, safety, and liberation? That is the question to ask.
So many of our achievement goals take the shape and flavor of the values of the oppressive systems we live within: buying & selling houses, earning esteemed positions in corporations, achieving pinterest weddings, winning admission to prestigious universities, adjusting our bodies to meet beauty norms.
What are the micro actions that hold the shape of these containers?
What are the ripple effects of these actions?
it’s already within you,
as they say
You are a spirit being in a human body on planet earth.
You know the way you want to carry out the journey you’ve come here to experience on this planet during this lifetime. The information lives inside your body. It is always there. You don’t have to know it all at once.
You know it in pieces & sprinkles.
Your breath ties you to it. Your heartbeat ties you to it. When we center, and slow, and ground, we find it. When we listen to the bird song and the lapping of the lake, we hear it. When we settle our bones onto the pressure of the earth, we feel it.
Your breath ties you to it. Your heartbeat ties you to it. When we center, and slow, and ground, we find it. When we listen to the bird song and the lapping of the lake, we hear it. When we settle our bones onto the pressure of the earth, we feel it.
Don’t worry if you’re lost, it’s part of the process.
Don’t worry if you can’t hear the longings inside of you; they are there.
They are simply waiting for you to slow down, to breathe, and to listen.
Achievement is a false god.
Your achievements are the container for your beingness.
Choose containers that give you the conditions to be alive and whole.
Wholly, completely alive.
If you would like to work with me 1:1 or in a group setting, I invite you to click the “other ways of being” button above. I love to having clarity calls with folks to learn more about where you are in your journey. Even if we don’t end up working together, it’s a gift to connect.
Alfie Kohn, a psychologist, has written about how parental praise actually does not mean anything and does not help shape/change behavior. Your post today is the umbrella under which his research falls. It does not mean anything to seek feedback for an achievement. The goalposts may always be moving within ourselves and without.
Really needed this reminder today, Maris. Thank you. Sending love.