NOTHING SHOULD BE DIFFERENT

NOTHING SHOULD BE DIFFERENT

For me, every conversation is the pushing of a boulder up a hill.

I engage in dialogue as an effort to move something somewhere and, to differing degrees, there is always a natural resistance to such change.

Our farm in Maui is on a hill and we have large stones throughout it. We use those stones to build retaining walls and make the land terraced and thus more amenable to cultivation.

From time to time, I find stones from the walls have tumbled down the hill, and so I carry them back up again.

When I do so, I think of the Greek myth about the King named Sisyphus who cheated death and messed with the natural order of things. The story goes that when God (Zeus) found out about this, he punished Sisyphus by requiring him to roll a boulder up a hill only to have it slip from his grasp near the top, meaning that he had to to roll it up the hill, over and over again, for eternity.

In the story, the punishment is a banishment and a condemnation. The irony though, for me, is that Sisyphus' punishment is essentially the human condition.

I work things out with my wife, only to have them degrade again. We oscillate between periods of good feelings and annoyance with each other. Indeed, by continuing to come back to kindness, by rolling the boulder of our marriage up the hill again, there is an overall upward trend of kindness in our lives....but in other domains, there is still a rolling back down. Our bodies, while kinder, age and ripen. Our children grow older, more responsible, less attached and ultimately become less interested, ultimately reaching out to us as infrequently as we do our own parents.

Nowadays, we use the adjective 'Sisyphean' to represent tasks that are laborious and futile. This meaning is an expression of a resistance to the natural condition of life.

One of the ideas that most serves my marriage with my wife is the total embrace of its health being like that of a physical body. We acknowledge that the natural tendency of a marriage is to decay. In the same way that a physical body not constantly cared for with diet and movement will weaken, a marriage not constantly cared for will weaken.

A strong marriage then is the result of pushing a boulder up a hill, over and over again, for eternity.

This can be said of anything we create.

A strong business, strong client relationships, strong company culture, etc are all results of pushing a boulder up a hill, over and over again, for eternity.

When we can see that all of life is in fact Sisyphean, when we can welcome every conversation as a boulder being rolled up a hill that is destined to roll back down again, we can engage in those conversations with a new lightness.

When we know in every fiber of our being that every success we achieve will also be the beginning of the end of something, we can continue to push and climb with a smile for whatever is to happen.

If we slip halfway up the hill, who cares? It was just going to come back down again when we got to the top anyway.

Enjoying the journey is no longer something we aspire to...it is something we are left with when we find that the journey is all there is.

This is Creating.

Creating is a way of being in the world in which every moment is a total embrace of both winning and losing, a total welcoming of both success and failure. At the deepest level, it is a glorious 'yes' to both pleasure and pain. The freedom and love you experience in Creating is circumstance independent.

Being this way; being capable of freedom and love despite the circumstances - gives you immense power in the world.

The amount of time and energy people waste resisting what is - or in other words, making the natural condition of life into a problem by saying things 'should be different' - is hard to fathom until you begin to stop resisting what is yourself.

What you will be capable of Creating when you fall in love with failure as much as you do success, I can only tempt you to imagine.

But if you are tempted to imagine this, then I welcome you into a conversation with us where together we can call you further into a possibility for you and your life than your current seeing may even give you access to.

This conversation is one that will occur iteratively over the course of a year in Creator’s Circle, with both myself and Creating Champion Darren Farfan .

It begins though with a one-off conversation. Without knowing you or what we will discuss, I can say that the conversation we have will be life-altering.

I can say this because I've pushed the boulder of this kind of conversation up the hill enough times to know what happens every single time.

If you're curious and you'd like to experience that, then either reply to this post or go here to apply for Creator’s Circle today.

I'll speak with you soon.

Loving you, JPM