Most of us in this life are seeking passion. Something that inspires us to do more, be more, give and want more. Some of us, however, are merely waiting for inspiration to guide us to our true selves.
Oftentimes we’re looking for that one thing to truly get our fires started. That one job, or person, or opportunity, to make us get our act together so that we can chase our destiny without distractions.
In our search, we often find that the things we wanted to have, are now more out of reach.
Because in just searching, within just waiting; we miss doing, eventually increasing the load of our light work and daily activities. Which, unless someone is paying your bills, means more survival.
Maintaining, rather than thriving.
You can become very cynical, dispassionate, and lazy while in this frame of life.
Personally, I’ve been trapped in there for months before. Only able to brainstorm ways to make it out of the maze but unable to execute any escape plans. I even began devaluing the legitimacy of trying to live a meaningful life in the first place.
But thankfully, I am aware that I am not the only one who’s experienced this.
Hoping that someone will benefit from my personal journey, I’ve compiled three major life lessons on the dangers of waiting for inspiration to chase the life you want.
I implore you to use these as a springboard to launch yourself out of redundant times of hopelessness. Instead, grant yourself swiftness in your pursuit of happiness.
Remember, we all get lost sometimes. Sometimes we just need to be reminded that we have the ability to get inspired. That we are capable of wanting and deserving of our ambitions.
1. Inspiration Isn’t Infinite and Fear can Replace It
Inspiration isn’t an endless reservoir of beautiful thoughts, decisive actions, and blueprints to create awesomeness.
It’s a limited jewel, at times at the bottom of the ocean in a chest guarded by sharks, poisonous choral, and even other explorers, like ourselves, looking for it. It’s a moment at its best and a thought in its purest form.
However, if left as is, it will be just that: a moment or thought. And one that others may obtain if you don’t.
“A dream without action is but a hope,” a wise man once said.
He also said that “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”
Uncapitalized inspiration can lead to much regret and resentment toward ourselves and the things that once inspired us.
Ins and Outs
Life is a rotation of ins and outs. Opportunities for you to engage or disengage with different activities, people, thoughts, and feelings.
Ins
Ins are moments where life presents itself to you as a chance for fun, adventure, and excitement. Opportunities, that, though they may take courage, will likely bring you a world of pleasure and happiness.
However, if your desires are always rationalized as unobtainable or undeserving by someone like yourself, then that can cause you to ignore the signs of certain ins.
This can leave you feeling perpetually shy, choked-up, small in stature, and overall feeling less significant than other people.
Waiting for inspiration to ignite the desires you know you have, yet needing 40 kicks in the butt to act on them, can make you miss the opportunities the other 39 kicks promised. Which can make you settle for a new base of desires and experiences.
As your innate confidence and courage drop, your ability to recognize opportunities you’d personally like to pursue, can too, drop. In time, after ignoring certain ins, the “you” you may come to recognize will be someone who once thought it would be cool to have had that opportunity.
“I remember I liked singing in front of people,” you think.
And eventually, it can devolve into you having never been capable of having it.
“I could never sing in front of people.”
Outs
Outs are moments in life that grant you a perceivable opportunity to get away or avoid something. In the sense of this paper, outs are moments where you lack the courage to do something, and so you wait for an opportunity to escape from that moment.
Know that if the fear of rejection or exertion of effort always causes you to desperately look for Outs, you’ll certainly find them.
When opportunities appear before you － good, solid, happy-ending opportunities － intensely looking for Outs, may make you believe they are impossible to achieve or sustain. And instead, leaving early becomes a better solution because it means you won’t have to try or struggle to maintain forward momentum toward that prosperous opportunity.
“This is going great! But what if they won’t like me anymore if I do this? I better just end it now before they end it on me.”
When we get acquainted with disengaging with happy feelings or moments of strength, we start to believe authentic joy and courage to be incredibly limited, and almost dangerous, states of being. When we begin waiting for inspiration to confirm our sense of good, we leave room to question whether we should be cynical and negative instead.
“I knew they didn’t really like me. I knew it wasn’t going to work out. I told myself 39 times it wouldn’t.”
Looking for Outs sets us up to always look at the world as though the challenges we face will always yield unfavorable results. We enter that, “Damned if I do; damned if I don’t,” mindset. And again, you’ll find solace in throwing away your shots at prosperity by creating a new meaning of what happiness or living means to you.
A new meaning that usually resembles limited interaction with people and activities out of fear of connection. Out of fear of enjoying yourself and having that joy taken away by some unfriendly force.
2. Inspiration Isn’t Always Necessary
It should not take significant Ins to provide you with enough energy to at the very least, maintain.
You shouldn’t need the inspiration to get out of bed in the morning, shower, eat, look presentable, and take care of basic life necessities. Inspiration does well in providing us with the tools we need to transcend basic living and mediocrity.
However, if all of its power goes into simply getting you to move limb after limb, struggling to connect one thought chain to another, then by the time you’re ready to act on its presence, you’ll have used up all of its power.
Instead, well-formed habits should be the ambassadors of your mundane activities.
This way, you don’t waste time or brain cells on unnecessary decision-making, debating which tasks you want to complete or avoid.
The Dreaded Distractions
Avoiding tasks often leads to a buildup of problems and errands that take precedence over your inspiration and eventually cause you to believe your desires as misguided or unobtainable.
Once distractions dominate your life, the passionate dreams of another life become simple fantasies, illogical in their naivety.
It’s saddening that we let thoughts like whether or not we should get out of bed and start the day, or go back to sleep, extinguish the fires of our inspiration.
These thoughts interrupt great ideas that tell us to get up and get active. We may hear, “I should get up and grab my notebook, or my guitar, or computer, camera, hockey stick, dog, friend, whatever, and do this great thing with them or that…”
Yet we often sweep our times to shine under the rug as the thought, I should just sleep, begins to creep in. And it’s unfortunate that our brains shoot us these amazing ideas at the times we’d least like to go through with them.
Not for Everyone, Though
Some people, aware of the beauty and scarcity of inspiration, quickly act on their newfound thoughts.
Lest they forget and suffer the mental scrutiny of their own consciousness at the sheer imbecility of their actions.
Instead of possibly losing a good idea or waiting for a better time to act on it, some people instantly engage with the inspiration that’s begun settling inside of them. And oftentimes, they’re awarded forward momentum that makes their later activities all the easier to complete and enjoy.
They don’t wait for later on when they have work.
They don’t wait for when they have more free time.
They don’t go looking for inspiration again after getting tired of having searched for it all day.
They take action immediately. And this action sets them up for success in the long run.
Nevertheless, there is a third point.
3. Inspiration, Can Indeed, Be Misleading
As stated, uncapitalized inspiration often leaves us with a sense of confused urgency, guilt, resentment, and fear.
It makes you think you need something you’ve lost. It can make you go crazy, obsessed with chasing the life you “knew” you could have, while it’s dangling from a fishing rod taped to your back.
“Catch meeeeee,” it’ll whisper.
And then you begin to add up all the memories and actions that led you to where you are now: without that life. And you begin to blame those that distracted you from obtaining it. Those that blatantly took it away from you. And of course, yourself.
You begin to hate the things that stole the dreams of your future away.
And when you do this, you give these things dominion over your brain and happiness. It’s as if, “Without that dream, what is the point of pursuing anything?”
That was my inspiration. That was my reason for getting out of bed.
Things that seem lost to us, especially those that we failed to enjoy while we had them or had the chance to, are often the things that plague us the most in their mystery. They create dreams and memories vivid enough to appear present.
Like the 45-year-old truck driver you know who always brings up the glory days of when he was a high school quarterback. Bragging about his chance to go pro, only to a) miss it because he had to take care of kids, b) miss it because he was injured, or c) miss it because he didn’t take care of his grades.
This man, like many others with misguided inspiration, becomes forever stuck in the dreams of his past and the future that should have been.
Or that one friend who is still in love with their ex. Sulking on the time invested and the helpless attempts at new romance, because everything reminds them of what they’ve lost. Leaving them waiting for the day their ex wakes up and realizes that they had everything they needed.
Even though they’re showcasing their new happiness with another person.
These people are essentially addicted to fond memories of dreams that never turned real. Peering into the rabbit hole of woulda-shoulda time again. Hoping, each time, to uncover some mystery to the puzzle of lost inspiration. And, should the resentment built up inside surpass the mental fortitude of sanity and logic, the dreams lost become obsessions to obtain.
Forcefully, if necessary.
If not by us, by our kids who we make play the sports WE loved. By our possessions and accolades that showcase how great WE were in our prime. Through our friends who have to sit and hear our stories of how much WE miss the glory days, our ex-lover, or just our old life. One we knew.
And so, the inspiration of the past fills us lustfully, and blinds us, often, to the present.
In the end
Inspiration is a powerful tool. Even so, it is not infinite in its resources. It can burn out and be replaced by a much darker flame.
Inspiration is also not always necessary. Although awesome when it does appear, it isn’t and shouldn’t be required to perform simple activities.
As a limited resource, it is best used on things we’d really like to use it on. Not deciding whether or not to pee in the morning, afraid we won’t be able to get back in bed fast enough before we realize we actually have to begin our day.
And inspiration can also take us down the wrong path.
In its beauty, it often commands our spirit and appears in the form of righteousness. Yet it can lie. Right to our faces, it can lie and create dreams, more lucid than reality, projecting us into a haze of vicarious scenarios of other people and forces. Causing us to chase opportunities we missed in the past. Making us miss opportunities happening now.
But… there’s a but
It can also be really cool!
It can bring life into uncertainty, creating curiosity instead of fear. It can build upon itself, borrowing from other forms of inspiration and snowballing into its own unique flow.
If allowed to be properly assessed by having roadblocks to its progress removed, foreseen, or quickly accepted and endured, it can manifest us from our lesser selves. People whom we have come to see in the mirror, yet someone we desire to be more than.
Inspiration can bring out our superpowers. But… should we ignore it, depend solely on it, or listen when we know it’s the evil side of its face, we will have a world of dangers to fight and conquer.
Or lose to.
Instead of Waiting for Inspiration…
Here’s a list of things you can do to get the life you want.
Number One
Just do it
Number Two
Number one
Number Three
I think you get the point.
Point is, you know what you want. You know what to chase.
It’s what excites you. What frightens you with the possibility of being real, yet the work ethic required to obtain it appears too great. But it’s not. It’s what you would throw away all the other bullshit for. What you bank on to truly save you from complacency. What makes your heart drop and your head race.
So go get it, before you lose it and go insane trying to obtain it.
And if you missed your shot because you didn’t do it, then do it again. And don’t let the simple things you have to do in between, come between you and that dream.
They’re just hurdles.
So jump, yo.
