I Live for One Moment Every Day
Every day I fight a war.
Every day I fight a war.
The enemies are my family, my friends, my job, my obligations, my pets, the Internet, TV, books, the news, food, sex.
If those sound like strange enemies, it’s because they are. Don’t get me wrong, I love all of them. My family, my pets, my work are my world.
But when it comes to doing my real work, my soul’s job, which is writing every day, they’re something else completely:
Distractions.
They don’t know they’re locked in a battle for my soul. They’re unwitting agents of distraction. That makes them the worst kind of enemies: well-meaning enemies.
All they really want is my time and energy. But I decided years ago that I was committed to one thing:
Getting my thoughts down on paper: articles, stories, ideas.
That’s what I was meant to do.
When you decide what you want to do in life, you have to make time for it. No one will give it to you. People always say to me, “I wish I had time to do this or that.” The world will eat up every single second of your life and leave you on your death bed wondering what went wrong.
But only if you let it.
This is a fight to the death. It’s a war of attrition. Every day the enemies array against you. They wear you down, stealing your precious time from you with smiles on their faces. What you did yesterday counts for nothing. Today is a new battle. There is no yesterday.
And the war is inside you as well.
You will face zero resistance if you want to have a drink, watch another episode of some sitcom, wander from store to store shopping or just chatting away idly on the phone. Some of that is good. It’s necessary. You can’t do your true work all the time. Your true work has a time and a place, just as everything else does but only after you’ve done your true work for the day.
As soon as you commit to something real in life, resistance kicks in and makes you weak. It presents you with all manner of distractions. That’s the story of the Buddha under the Bodhi tree. A wave of demonic influences comes after him, just as he is about to have the ultimate realization. Pretty women, money, power, war, fear. All of it comes crashing down on him as a series of monstrous hallucinations.
But he resists the resistance.
You must do the same.
This is what Steven Pressfield calls The War of Art.
To do something unique in life, whether that’s writing or founding a fantastic company, or painting a stunning portrait or coding a life changing app, or making a breakthrough discovery, you must set your purpose to iron rails. There is no swerving you. You refuse to be stopped. In Norse mythology, Odin hung himself on a tree and sacrificed one of his eyes to achieve ultimate wisdom.
The myths of old are not fairy tales. They are the super-compressed, deeply encoded wisdom of life. All you have to do is open your eyes to see.
Odin’s tale is simple. There is a price to pay. This is not free. It means sacrificing time with family, friends, time going to parties and dancing and drinking. You can still do those things, but never when it’s time to do your work. You must find a way every single day to do that thing until that thing becomes your life.
This is reality. This is not a weekend retreat. There is no part time, no reset button, not second prize.
This is your life. And you have to take it back by any means necessary.
You can die at any time and so you have to choose your battle. Only you can figure out for yourself if this is the hill you’re willing to die on. For me that is writing. I can’t tell you your purpose. You’ll have to figure that out for yourself.
But I can tell you what it’s like when you find it, so you’ll know when you get there. The pattern is the same, no matter what you chose to do.
Here’s what it looks and feels like at the moment you sit down to do your true work:
Dispatches from the Battlefield
I’m writing to you from the battlefield, reporting live.
Every time I face the page, I want to give up.
Even if I had unlimited energy the moment before I sat down to type, suddenly I’m tired and unable to move forward. Every step is a slog. My mind is coated with molasses.
I don’t know what I’ll say next, or what I should focus on. There are so many things I want to say. I don’t have writer’s block because I don’t have enough to say, I just have too much to say and I have to choose. I can’t write it all. Time is against me. There is only so much time in the day. I can’t neglect my family and friends forever. The endless choices torture me. I can’t decide which is more important, which will move people, change lives, help people, change the world or just end up as another click-bait distraction.
That’s when the depression kicks in. My mind rebels.
“You’re worthless, useless, a fraud. This is no point to continuing. All is lost. You’ve wasted your life.”
But I ignore the chorus. I don’t quit. Somehow I keep going. I find a way, putting one foot in front of the other.
Then it’s the circumstances that get to me. Maybe my wife is doing a project and making a lot of noise in the house. Maybe work keeps calling after hours. Maybe the stock market moved against me. Maybe I am on a plane and there is no room.
But I keep climbing the mountain. I ignore the imperfect circumstances, the cramped economy class seat on a plane, the baby shouting at the coffee shop, the wind howling through my windows, and I keep working.
And then something happens. I don’t know when or where, but all of a sudden, there it is again.
The world shifts.
Time stretches out and disappears.
My fatigue is gone.
My breathing shifts to something between sleep and sex.
My mind expands, farther than any drug could ever carry me, or any meditative chanting and I look around, unsure whether I’m asleep or awake, but I’m absolutely clear, crystalline, perfect.
The words flow out of me, as if they’re already written and I’m just there to pluck them from the Heavens.
My mind is quiet. All doubt is gone. There is nothing in the way now.
The woman next to me on the plane withdraws her arm. There is enough space. The baby in the coffee shop stops crying or I can’t hear him anymore.
It’s here that I come to talk to my perfect self, the self beyond time, a spirit, a fiery presence of pure potential.
I’m there and everything is calm again. Nothing can hurt me here. I am immune from disease and death, immune from the insanity of the world, of war and famine, of lost loves and failure.
And I know that no matter what, if I can continue to come here every day, I will be all right. I will have done my work. And nobody can take that from me. This is my work alone. My gift. My burden. My calling. It’s the part that is always there, waiting for me, if only I will fight the battle again.
And then just like that, the song is over.
I’ve finished for the day.
I wrap up the chapter, or put the finishing touches on an article. I pass the point of diminishing returns and then I go back to my life.
My family and friends are my family and friends again, transformed into something beautiful and new and wonderful.
My consciousness snaps back like a rubber-band to its former size.
And tomorrow I will fight the war again anew. I get no credit for yesterday. But today I am done, at peace.
I have fought the demon and slayed him.
I am safe and no matter what else happens that day, I will put my head to the pillow and rest, knowing I have done my work one more time.
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A bit about me: I’m an author, engineer and serial entrepreneur. During the last two decades, I’ve covered a broad range of tech from Linux to virtualization and containers.
You can check out my latest novel,an epic Chinese sci-fi civil war saga where China throws off the chains of communism and becomes the world’s first direct democracy, running a highly advanced, artificially intelligent decentralized app platform with no leaders.