Follow The Path Of Most Resistance
Our inner critic keeps us from following our hearts — here’s how to beat it at its own game.
Odysseus and his crew completed their month-long pit stop in Aeolia, setting sail for the homeland ahead. As they parted, the king of the island Aeolus entrusted a gift to Odysseus: an oxhide bag containing the all-powerful winds which would guide his ship toward Ithaca.
With years of war and years more of sailing behind him, the finish line seemed in sight. Smoke from the city billowed in the distance, and keeping faith his men and the strong winds would make the journey home, the travel-weary Odysseus allowed himself sleep.
It was only then that his crewmates saw an opening.
Odysseus had spent the trip safeguarding the bag, they reasoned, so it must have contained loot he was hoarding for himself. In one fell swoop, they unsealed it, its contents spilling out with a vengeance and blowing the ship in reverse until it had returned to the start of its long course.
“It takes years to build up, it takes moments to destroy.”
— Haruki Murakami
Forging Ahead
At first glance, the excerpt from the Greek legend The Odyssey tells a story of travelers who lost a bet and paid the piper; but the fable offers a real-world lesson of the fate that can befall us too, if we let it.
Perhaps it’s a daunting written assignment we’ve put through the wringer of 100 revisions, only to chuck it in the trash. Maybe it’s a lifestyle change we swore we’d make but are sitting on. In life or in work, we all have things we stand to gain if we do the hard part of starting, and let the work take care of itself — but we fall short of reaching any would-be flow state when we let our impulses block the way.
Whether it’s fearing uncharted waters or looking for an easy way out, these second thoughts ignore the opportunity for a reset dangling in front of us; short-term solutions can be as tempting as they are tenuous. Yet out of a desire to avoid the specter of sacrifice without payoff, beginners in their field can be lured into this trap.
For someone in the thick of it, it can be even worse. Despite overcoming the initial roadblocks to get on the grind, the voice telling us to abandon ship grows louder, gnawing at our mind so we lose sight of the task at hand.
If we’ve been here, we’ve learned to call its bluff — by withstanding excess criticism and doubts from ourselves and others as we forged ahead with something new, the muck we traversed along the way molding us into better shape.
But for those at a crossroads in life, keeping our dispositions in check is vital. Take the example of pattern recognition: when we’re looking for an excuse to doubt something, we’ll find it — not through a thorough examination of ideas, but through seeing things that aren’t there, cherry-picking from our mental repository incidents that confirm our biases. X happened when I did Y, so Y is a no-go, we’ll think.
The calculation can tilt negative or positive: when we have stars in our eyes we’ll find ourselves tempted with that easy out to replace finishing the work we started, like trading our tolerable position near the top of the corporate ladder for a low-grade one because it pays better, or blindly hoping to find treasure in a mystical bag.
Following Our Hearts
In his book The War of Art, Steven Pressfield gives this work-defying, potential-denying naysayer clogging up our inner-monologue a name: it’s resistance, and it’s everywhere.
We can visualize the give-and-take nature of effort and resistance by picturing dipping our toes into a pool and finding out the water’s fine, yet staying paranoid something might lurk underneath.
These inhibitions equate our familiarity with old habits to safety despite backsliding from duties carrying a risk of its own, and nothing that requires our energy is free from its shadow. That being said, we’re equipped to deal with it as long as we recognize it comes from within. Equal to it is another inner force calling us to action, one we should heed with its advice borne out of potential and not denial, as Pressfield writes:
“We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become. We are who we are from the cradle, and we’re stuck with it.
Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we are already and become it.”
— Steven Pressfield
He goes on to evoke imagery of a writer who doesn’t write, and a painter who never picks up a brush. When we don’t pay our dues in listening to what the heart tells us, we risk pushing motivation down until it’s spent, or worse, we sulk in it until it becomes destabilizing energy to ourselves and those around us.
If this is the state of our lives now, it may feel like we’ve lost our way, but it doesn’t have to be that way. This comes down to personal belief, but I think of unused potential as a superpower. No matter how many hits we’ve taken, we’ll always have an inkling of a feeling we can get back on the horse.
It might be a small voice, but with time as its aid, we can ride that conviction to the first step toward meaningful change in our lives — it’s in our hands.
Knowing the Enemy
To venture into a place of self-improvement isn’t something that happens overnight, but resistant impulses won’t just lie in wait. Their influence extends into nearly every corner of our lives where work is at play, and only by recognizing how they hold our intimacy with the before times over our heads to resist change can we taper the power they hold over us.
Pressfield notes the common incarnations of resistance we may encounter in daily life, and the ones I found personally important are summarized below:
- Procrastination: It’s falling back on instant gratification under the pretense our future selves (e.g. “I’ll do it tomorrow”) won’t. Thinking of this as resistance’s bluff can help break the habit.
- Trouble: When potential inverts, it invites trouble. Internalizing failure makes us expend the energy we’ve sat on in negative ways; substance addiction and violence are examples of resistance turned proactive, but not the positive outlet potential needs.
- Criticism: Those insecure about their resistance hold up a mirror to themselves when they knock down others’ self-improvement. If you find you’re the agitator, picture reversing the roles.
- Self-doubt: This hits close to home, as I’ve felt it while writing this piece. Unless it becomes self-loathing, self-consciousness can be an asset as it tells us our heart is in something. Resistance shouldn’t cripple us, but we also shouldn’t become so overconfident that it isn’t a presence. A grounded mindset puts us on the right track.
- Fear: Like self-doubt, fear trails behind our aspirations. It’s resistance that appeals to our rawest emotions to pull us under. Tackling it means staring it down, stepping out of our comfort zone, and doing our work.
Closing Thoughts
Left to their own devices, a decade passed before Odysseus and his men arrived at Ithaca’s shores. He’d returned to Aeolus for help in the aftermath of his crew’s recklessness, but the king wasn’t amused: taking Odysseus’s misfortune as a sign he had provoked the ire of the gods, he was whisked off the island.
The arcs of our lives don’t bend in one direction. Neither did Homer strictly write tragedies, which is why the tale doesn’t end with the travelers ceding to tunnel vision in the last leg of the race. They instead find the will to pick themselves up and start again, a useful ability whether ours is an equally arduous journey or a 5-mile sprint.
When resistance stands in the way, our inner critic’s noise can drown us, or we can instead weather the storm toward self-redemption. Except when it’s our turn to take the plunge, the cavalry won’t come for us. Only we can chart a path from our potential.
We owe it to ourselves to try.
