Chemistry taught me that initiating a process takes more energy than to keep a process running. What I didn’t realize that life is based on the same rule. It is initiating a process, starting a task, beginning a new venture that takes most of the courage.
The real problem
I can study for hours, but in order to come to that learning phase, is a struggle in itself. I can write, but to sit down and begin writing is a different fight altogether. Even sitting down to watch a movie isn’t an easy task. I can’t just find the right time.
I have seen people struggling with the same issue. What is it with starting something new? Is it laziness, ignorance. Might even sound like a case of procrastination. But more than that it is our love for being comfortable. To entertain a change, no matter how small, is not quite acceptable to us. We would rather keep doing whatever it is that we are doing at the moment than move to something else until of course, it is the last day to submit the class assignment.
It isn’t change that we are afraid of, it is just the comfort that we are not ready to give up. It is not laziness, it is just the fact that we don’t have enough heart in the task. Any task, no matter what, calls for our undivided attention. And to attend to something needs our heart and brain. We need no reminders if we put in all our efforts; if we really want to complete that particular task; if we really want to read that new Jeffrey Archer title.
The solution
I once read somewhere, if you want to wake up in the morning like really wake up, you need no alarms; you will wake up on your own, on that very exact time if you want to. The question is how do you distinguish between what you really want to do and what you feel you want to do?
This is a problem almost every student goes through, I definitely do. The solution? The proper and true classification of what you want and you need to do to get it. It sounds easy but is one of the most difficult things you will ever have to do. To choose from thousands and thousands of opportunities, and to distinguish what you genuinely would want to do, is like finding a needle in the largest haystack.
The energy you require to initiate a task comes from your brain, the brain which knows exactly what is it that you desire, your steps automatically takes you to it. You have a practical examination tomorrow, but what you actually want is to write an article about something you have been thinking for months now. That’s desire and that’s where all your energy is directed to. Mine surely is.
It isn’t our brain that we have to train, but it is our energy that we need to bend in the right way. And that energy bends as soon as you find that source of satisfaction, the source that appeals to your brain, mind and energy alike.