Imagine holding small weights in your hands while holding your arms straight out, perpendicular to your body.
You might think that would be a simple task, at least until your muscles started to quiver and your joints began to ache. After all, you aren’t really being asked to do any work in this scenario, all you have to do is resist the omnipresent pull of gravity.
You can use your energy to do work, pumping the weights up and down, or you can use your energy to resist work, just holding those weights out until you are shuddering in pain and gasping for breath.
It may seem tiring to do the damn work in front of you, but work is usually fulfilling. There is motion and momentum involved, giving us a real sense of accomplishment and development. Work makes us feel like we did something, made something happen, that we got somewhere.
Resistance, on the other hand, may seem like the easy choice, the inert choice, the less costly choice, but in reality, resistance is wearing, expensive and leaves us feeling worn and futile. Resistance is energy burned in staying stuck in one place, life used up by trying to fight the forces that pull at us all the time.
Work gives us a chance to use those forces, to work with those forces, to create something new and better, while resistance puts us at the mercy of those forces, demanding we fight them all the time to just stay in place.
When I hear people say how tired they are, I usually find that they aren’t the kind of tired where they fall into bed with the knowledge of a day well spent, rather they are sick and tired of the ennui and routine of their life. They use up their energy in the mundane, the boring, resisting actually doing the hard work that can create new choices and new power for themselves.
Life engenders life.
Energy creates energy.
It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich.
Sarah Bernhardt
Resistance is the easiest way to consume your own life without having anything to show for it.
Doing the damn work may seem the harder and more complicated option, but in the end, it is by far the most rewarding choice.
You are going to pay the price of life everyday, whatever you choose to do with it.
Wouldn’t you rather have something to show for it?
Callan 