COMMITMENT REQUIRES IMAGINATION

    At age 41, Dara Torres returned to the pool to obtain a spot in her fifth Olympic games, unprecedented for an American female swimmer, especially given the fact that she sat out the 1996 and 2004 Olympic games. In fact, she is the first woman in history to swim in the Olympics past the age of 40. Her Olympic career spans 24 years.

   One of the seventeen lies is, "I'm too old for that." It's not a lie that Dara Torres tells.

   Michael Phelps said, after winning his 8th Gold Medal, "With so many people saying it couldn't be done, all it took was a little imagination."

   Notice the link between imagination and commitment. Imagine being totally committed and focused on one thing, the only thing.   

   My friend Nick's daughter asked, "Will will get to the airport on time?" and Nick said "Absolutely." Even after Nick was stopped by a cop and left his driver's license on the seat of the car they still let him and his daughter on the plane because he spoke to them in a certain way, and produced a very imaginative simulation of identification...he had made a commitment to himself and his daughter that they be on that plane.
   
   What is commitment other than Nick saying "Absolutely" to his daughter?

   People who say, "Done" when you request something. That reflects a commitment. Not a goal or a wish or a hope. But a commitment.

   Look at how time disappears when one is committed. It's not "going to be done" in the future, it's done. Already. Even before it's done.

   It's not "in the now" or in the past or in the future, because with commitment, there is no time. That's why tenses are meaningless in the face of a commitment.
So is time meaningless.

   "Can you coach me by phone Friday at 3pm?" someone asks and
I say, "No. I will have just gotten off a plane to New York." Look at that weird tense. Will have gotten. What you're seeing is my commitment to be in New York. It makes mincemeat of time. And tense.

   People say, "I'm in New York that week." That's present tense! Why use present tense when it's the future? Because commitment is there.

   In my mind I'm already there. I'm still enrolling people into my coaches' school in October, but in my mind they are there already. I only have three spots left and people are calling every day. It isn't quite full yet, but from the moment I set the dates for it two months ago it was already full. All nine of them. Done. Absolutely.

   Certainty and commitment are different than belief. The etymological root of belief is to "fervently hope" something is true. To believe in yourself is to fervently hope you can be as good as you hope you are. But certainty is commitment and it's different. It's the internal voice hat says, "I'm doing this."

    No matter what.

    No matter how hard.

    Only death would stop me.

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     So to revisit a question I've had about Byron Katie....Katie's is not a philosophy of live and let live, everything's perfect as it is.....it's a process for seeing that, but it's not a BELIEF in that. It's a tool to cultivate the garden, but it's not the garden. It's a meditative tool to remind you that the universe is kind, and God rules. And that's a beautiful tool but it's nothing to believe in.

   If you think doing Katie's work with your thoughts precludes you from committing to something (other than survival,) then you are confusing it with a belief. It's not a belief. Or a philosophy. It's a process for finding truth. And for finding beauty (because they are the same.)

   I can do the work of Katie and get happier and happier every day and I can simultaneously make a commitment to do something big and exciting and succeed at it.

   This I know from my personal experience and the experience of my friends and clients.

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    What we used to attribute to senility is often now being discovered to be simple lack of use. As we get older, we do less and less thinking. (We hire accountants and lawyers and assistants to think for us. Our love of books gives way to the remote control and mindless viewing.) We begin the downward slide. It's a slippery slope once we flop down on it.

      Because the less thinking we do the less we can do.

      Studies show that people who work crossword puzzles in their old age keep their brains and memories sharper and even live longer than those who spend more and more time in front of the life-devouring television set.

       At the age of 73, Norman Maclean decided to reject the idea of going into a comfortable retirement.  It would have been easy to do. He had taught literature at the University of Chicago for many years, and he "deserved" a nice, restful retirement. But something was nagging him. In all the years that he taught literature he wondered if he himself could have been a writer. Then it was almost as if he took the great writer George Eliot's advice: "It's never too late to be what you might have been."

     Norman Maclean said he "decided to give up some of the things associated with happiness in old age like running around with women, travel, etc."  Instead, he would find out if he could be a writer.  He went to his cabin in Montana, and in a joyfully disciplined way began to write.  He realized that he had it right there in his hands to experience his true life. Two years later he emerged with his highly-acclaimed masterpiece, A River Runs Through It. It is a book written with a passion and poetic fire normally only associated with young brains. 

     It was simply not true that he was too old to become a writer.

     Yet I can't tell you how many people have told me that they "always wanted to" write, or act, or be a musician, or something like that, but that now, of course, it was a little late, because they were thirty or forty or fifty years old.  "I'm too old for that" they say with a straight face.   
         
      Lying about age is done to hide away what is true about action. It is true to the soul that action is always possible in the direction of one's dreams.
      

Comments

[Migelangia]

kamal valeranice me din me 1 bar jaru hiediznn jarur dekh leta hu me apane sare friends ko bhi kahta hu ki jaror dekhe aap se 1 gujarish he ki aap osho ke bare me kuch kahe

[Tom Wall]

Steve, your style of writing has a soothing flow to it.....to paraphrase Norman Maclean ..."A River Of Meaning Runs Through It"...living one's full human potential is indeed a process and not a belief. It is beyond belief.

Including the power called God in your life is a tool that works wonders. Committment, imagination, and follow through open many doors.

Thank you for your insights.

[Vaughn Nystrom]

Steve... What does it mean that Katie's philosophy is a process and not a belief? Can we really ever escape belief? She likes to play with it by showing that one belief is as true as another, bursting the bubbles of both. But isn't that a belief, too? Does she believe in The Work? It's turtles all the way down.

[Tom Volkar / Delightful Work]

"It's not "in the now" or in the past or in the future, because with commitment, there is no time. That's why tenses are meaningless in the face of a commitment.
So is time meaningless."

This observation is so meaningful to me because it demonstrates that commitment either is or is not. I've stumbled this article. Thank you.