Writing Wednesdays
Committed to What?
By Steven Pressfield | Published: January 2, 2013
We’ve been talking about depth of commitment for three weeks now. But one question has not yet been asked:
What exactly are we committed to?
"Mark it zero, Dude!"
Is it our art, our career, our family, our nation? Lemme take the long way around by flashing back to an earlier era in my own life.
For years I was committed to nothing. I mean nothing. I suppose if you tied me to a tree and threatened to bayonet me, I would’ve tried to talk you out of it. But even that, my own life, I wasn’t particularly committed to.
I was bored a lot in those days. In the midst of otherwise exciting events, even in physical danger, I was still bored. I cared about specific things in the moment, but overall? Why? What for?
In other words, I had no concept of being committed to anything. The idea of commitment never even crossed my mind. At one point I found myself living in a basement room in a halfway house for mental patients in Durham, North Carolina. Here’s the passage from Turning Pro:
Then one night I had a dream. In the dream I came into my room and found that my shirts had all folded themselves in the drawer (instead of being mashed together in their usual jumbled mess). My boots had crawled out from under the bed where I normally kicked them when I took them off and had set themselves upright and tidy. They had shined themselves.
When I woke up, I thought, “I’m ambitious! I have ambition!”
That dream was a turning point. The idea of “having ambition” was something I had run away from for years. I thought ambition was wrong. It was evil. People of ambition were the ones who were screwing up the world.
Now suddenly I saw things differently. What “ambition” meant to me in that moment was embracing my own life and trying to do something with it.
I thought, “I can’t keep living this way. I have to do something.”
Which brings me back to depth of commitment and the question, “What, then, are we committed to?” Here’s how I answer that for my own life:
I’m not committed to any specific endeavor. Not a family or a cause or a field of enterprise. Not an ideal of service or sacrifice, not an art, not a people or a calling.
My commitment is to the spirit inhering within me.
Is an acorn committed to becoming an oak? An acorn can only respond to the imperative of life within it.
That’s my commitment too.
I live in this body. I inhabit this mind. I didn’t choose them. I don’t know what they are, or what they mean, or how I came to be united to them. I don’t even know what “I” means, or why an “I” exists that’s distinct and separate from my body and mind.
But I believe (and experience has demonstrated to me) that there is an intelligence beyond my ego that does know. If Socrates were still around, he’d call it “soul.” He might use the Greek word daimon. Or even the Latin word genius.
My job, I decided after that dream, is to wake up. It’s not to “make the most of” my life in the sense of achieving or maximizing the experience of pleasure, happiness, power, whatever.
My job is to look out and look in, to keep my eyes open, to ask questions of the world and of myself. Who am I? Why am I here? What does it mean to be alive?
I realized after that dream that I had harbored ambition all along. Tremendous ambition. But I had been terrified to admit it to myself—and paralyzed by the thought of attempting to live it out. That’s why I was bored. That’s why my life felt so shallow. I had made it that way by the way I perceived it, as a means of protecting myself against striving and failing.
I know, I know, you have to be pretty high on the Maslow Pyramid to even be lucky enough to think about this stuff. But here we are. I’m there, and so are you.
What are we committed to?
It may be our calling, our family, a cause, a tradition, an ideal. But underneath it’s to our one-of-a-kind spirit, whatever that may be and wherever it may lead us. When we possess depth of commitment, we are no longer bored with our lives or living them in a state of narcosis or ironic detachment.
When we possess depth of commitment, we are aligned with our Muse, our soul, our Self (or we’re at least trying to be aligned).
The concepts of “amateur” and “pro” are just another way of asking ourselves how committed we are to conscious participation in the discovery of our selves. Is it a part-time gig? Or are we in it for keeps?
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Thank you Steven for reminding me what it is to be alive in this moment, and to make the most of what we have. As you say in Do the Work, “Trust the soup.”
Best wishes for 2013.
Julian.
The Japanese have a term, “ikigai” which is that which makes your live worth living.
Wow! This post really hits home with me. Last summer I lost my soulmate. When he disappeared I was devastated. For weeks I couldn’t get it together. But after months of grief and persistence I finally thought I did. But it wasn’t until he reappeared this summer (almost a year and a day after he left) that I realized I had lost my commitment to life when he left. I had been going through the motions of living, but something deep inside me had left with him. That’s why I’ve felt numb and bored most of the time.
Now he’s back to stay. In the course of the many deep conversations we’ve had about what happened last summer and why he left (he was afraid to commit to our relationship ~lol~) I discovered my loss of commitment to living. Wow. That was a shock: to realize I’d given up on life and didn’t know it. Eeeek!!
Last week he became a partner with me in my publishing business. It’s wonderful to have a partner who also enjoys business as much as I do.
The last few days we’ve been tweaking my schedule for 2013 so he can relieve some of my too-heavy workload. In the process I rediscovered my “purpose” in life and business. I’ve been operating according to it and creating books that jibe with this purpose, but had somehow consciously forgotten it the last few years.
So I know exactly how you felt when you had that dream. Suddenly everything had deep meaning again, didn’t it? All the puzzle pieces fell into place, and life was painted in vivid color again. Weeeee! That’s how I feel now. I’m thrilled to be consciously aware of my purpose in life again and committed to life again. It’s an awesome feeling!!! Thanks so much for this wonderful post. Like I said, it really resonates with me this week!
Steven,
This was a wonderful article and it was a wonderfully effective call to action for me…I thank you from the bottom of my heart for all of your work!
Indra
Beautiful. Just beautiful. You’ve once again taken me to a deeper place. One that I’ve been skirting around for days. Thank you Steven.
Wishing you all the best for 2013,
Kathleen
I have thought long and hard about a response.
Sometimes dialogue has to wait.
So here’s my response:
Yes.
On the flip-side, Steven, what do you say to people who feel like they have ambition and drive but constantly feel like they are never working hard enough. Is that the downside to having ambition–the constant state of anxiety wondering if you have worked your hardest?
Either way, thank you for this, and I look forward to more Writing Wednesdays.
John MacGregor
I’m not Steve, though maybe someday I’ll play him in the radio mystery series. But I have an opinion.
Anybody who’s trying to create art feels like they’re not working hard enough. The day you feel like you’ve done enough, they’ll be asking your next of kin whether it’s going to be an open or closed casket event.
“I’m not working hard enough, fast enough, big enough” is par for the course.
Now, if you’re working hard, fast, big, and not getting anywhere, consider the possibility that you’re working a shadow career, not the Main Stage.
I’ve spent 5 years writing and publishing 9 business books and one trivial mystery. It was just a way of postponing the hard work of writing a mystery that wouldn’t make me cry every time I read Raymond Chandler and thought, I’ll never do that.
Shadow career. Writing business books feels a whole lot like real writing, and for someone else, it might be. But I know who I am: I’m a mystery writer. I was born 9 months to the day after Chandler’s death, and I’ve known for decades that I need to step, maybe not into those shoes, but a clean shiny version of ‘em that fit me.
Ambitious, but not working hard enough: you have two choices, to focus on the doughnut, or to focus on the hole. You’re missing something you should be doing, or you’ve got something superfluous.
Or, possibly, it’s the writer’s yearning, and you’ll get over it when you win the pine box derby.
John, I agree with Joel in one respect…you may need some tweaking. But I have a bit of a different viewpoint on that. I’ve been a published author for 25 years, and 55 of my books have been published by various publishers. But I haven’t always been a genre novelist (romantic erotica).
I started out in the small press as a literary poet. Five years later I began writing and publishing literary fiction as well. Then in 2005, after the first volume of my collected poems was published, I went into the genre market, writing fiction exclusively and haven’t written any poetry since.
Each time I made a change it was because I felt I was spinning my wheels. I realized it was because I had either accomplished everything I set out to do in one medium (poetry), or I had a yearning to explore something different (the long form of novels and novellas). It’s been my experience creative people grow and change as they work their craft every day. And our focus can change every decade or so.
Maybe this is what’s happening to you. The only way to know is if the kind of books you’re writing now still make your heart sing and the process of writing them continually fascinates you. If not you might be on the verge of a change in medium, genre, or whatever. It seems to happen to me every 8-10 years.
I so resonate with being connected to your inner spirit as your driving force. Thank you for taking us to the core instead of skimming the surface or staying with the superficial.
Commitment “to the spirit adhering within me.” I LOVE the way that speaks. It strikes me as a close cousin of neuroscientist David Eagleman’s possibilianism theory. Possibilism is unbounded by our limited knowledge. “I don’t know” is not an end but an acknowledgment of beautiful staggering uncertainty and an embrace of a beginning. A commitment which is necessarily built on firstly, both an acceptance and a love of yourself as a miracle (word being used non-religiously) and then with the responsibility of making your life worth living.
Dear Sir
This is why your work appeals to me. The muse that flows through you touches something within me. It has nothing to do with personalities.
I remember my first response to your blog, stating how such a path of commitment is a treacherous one. It could never be otherwise because you are awake.
You are awake from you petty thoughtless existence defined by the ego and others to a realm in which the muse supports and assists.
The muse will clothe you, feed you and pay your bills if you let it. However if you say the work is mine you suffer.
I truly understand where you are coming from. Thank you for your encouragement and reminding me.
With blessings
Jasvir Samrai