Who Are You Resisting Becoming?
Dear Future Human,
It’s been a while since I’ve written here.
I had hoped to post more often while getting Dear Future Human ready for publication, but I underestimated what the final stages would take. There are details I never imagined, and they have had most of my attention these past months. Most of them are behind me now. The book comes out on October 3rd.
The funny thing is that I never wanted to write a book. I only felt compelled to write this one, and there came a point when staying quiet was harder than writing.
Now that I’m close to holding the finished book in my hands, I find myself thinking less about what I wrote and more about who I had to become in order to write it. That has led me to reflect on something I've been feeling a great deal lately.
Resistance.
We talk about resistance as though it were the enemy, something to overcome, something standing between us and the life we want. I have come to think it works more like pain. It is not there to be avoided or overcome. It is there to get our attention.
Sometimes resistance is fear trying to keep us safe. Sometimes it's wisdom telling us something isn't right. And sometimes, as it has been for me, it's simply the friction that comes with becoming someone we've never been before.
I’ve been resisting writing for as long as I can remember.
Part of my resistance comes from being an immigrant and never quite feeling at home writing in English because I felt insecure about my grammar. Somewhere along the way I developed the belief that I simply wasn’t a writer.
Which is curious considering I’ve written for most of my life. Thousands of pages. And despite what people tell me, there is still a part of me that doesn’t quite believe it.
Perhaps resistance isn’t protecting us from failure. Perhaps it’s protecting the identity we’ve grown accustomed to being.
Writing this book kept asking me to let go of mine. The resistance was showing me where I was still holding on.
Some of the most meaningful moments in our lives are not on the other side of resistance. They are in our willingness to get curious about what it is trying to reveal.
What has resistance been trying to teach you lately?
This morning, as I was slowly coming to lying in bed, that the first conscious feeling I noticed was: resistance.
It showed up as a sensation of mild, but persistent contraction around my heart. Definitely uncomfortable, maybe even painful.
And then I noticed my next impulse to “move away” from that discomfort, to go “do stuff,” to fix a coffee, clean up the dishes, organize my day, answer emails.
And because I was in a perceptive state this morning, I was able to notice how the sensations I felt in my body instantly shifted as I moved (mentally) into what I would now “do.” It felt like all color was taken out of my heart at once. It felt like a grey cloth was being put over that discomfort. The discomfort wasn’t gone, but it was about to be buried underneath activity, muted, flattened.
Before I began my morning routine, I reserved time to examine this resistance.
And here I sit, feeling into it.
There’s a clear message that emanates from that feeling of resistance: “I don’t want to!” This is how I felt as a kid. Everything was a chore, everything I did was a thing I had to do, or so I believed. And I still seem to carry that same “trauma” within! Even though nobody is forcing me to do anything. I’m a single, almost 50 year old man. What the heck?
Is this the flailing child, or one of its mechanisms to “defend” itself, still running amok inside of me, putting “grey colored glasses” through which I see my life over my eyes first thing in the morning?
There’s got to be more information there.
I’ll take your invitation, Ronit, and will dive into that sensation of resistance. You just gave me a question to take with me!