Armchair Failures And Unfinished Business That Never Started

Feeling bad about not doing things, that you didn’t do

Its a Monday morning and you really want to start the week off on a high and get back into the work / write / workout routine. Given a weeks’ break and a weak body after a bout of the Flu, you figure that the best thing for a quick boost would be a rapid-fire set of pushups. 30 is the magic number in your head, just to test the waters as this was usually your warmup exercise.

But then this series of nagging thoughts of came in;

“will I be able to do 30?”
“after all, I am not as fit I was 10 years ago”
“I was just in bed sleeping and watching TV most of last week and stuffing myself with not-the-most-healthy food because “I can’t really taste anything”
“the last thing I want is to over do it and hurt myself”

…and all sorts of other self deprecating Bull Shit etc etc

But the most compelling argument against doing these pushups usually is that that you might not be able to do the 30 pushups that you initially wanted to do; that you will not be able to “finish what you started”. So you just end up mucking about the room feeling miserable about yourself for ‘not being able to do even 30 pushups’. And this was a feeling that you are very familiar with. You would just feel shitty about not being able to do what you wanted to do and then eat some carbs or sugar to make yourself feel better about not doing what you didn’t do.

It is exactly what I would have done, One year ago in this moment of the ‘loser-mentality’. But I had come a long way since then, worked on myself in a few months mentally and emotionally more than I had done in decades, so my ‘attention seeking’ ‘feeling sorry for myself’ Ego was not going squat free (or in this case, pushup free), this time.

I forcefully silenced that inner ‘whiner’ voice and got down on the floor in the Pushup position. I did not even leave time for my brain to process and react what was happening and went into the frenzy of pushups. I had done something abso-fucking-lutely Amazing…I had STARTED!

And by the time that I was flat on the floor I had done 20 push ups, 10 pushups Less the 30 that I wanted to do before I started. That was some consolation on its own, but then the next few simple yet powerful logical insights blew my mind;

I apologise if I have not been able to articulate my insights as profoundly as it occurred to me Firsthand, but I have put it in the most rudimentary way possible as it happened to me.

I am guilty of, many times in my life, having a desire to finish something a certain way, be it in terms of quality and/or quantity but overthinking it so much that in my mind, I had ‘started it, completed and failed at it’. And because I am a generally Creative person and have been blessed / cursed with such a vivid imagination, I was even experiencing those feelings of disappointment, despair and dejection of having not been able to ‘finish what I had started’ the way that I had hoped to. The danger of this kind of overthinking is that it reinforces the notion that these ‘Armchair failures’ are actual, real and eventual. So much so that, it prepares the mind and body to react to this failure, without attempting to Act on it or even try.

Do you realise how many times we live this ‘Armchair failure’ fantasy of ‘NOT starting, NOT finishing and NOT achieving’ as if it were reality. And how we have conditioned our minds and bodies to unconsciously accept a Negative outcome as the default outcome of things that we never even started to do in the first place. My pushups scenario was just the tip of the Iceberg, just an innocent glimpse into the twisted world of ‘unfinished business…that never started’.

The next time that your puny Ego starts talking you out of doing those 20 pushups, that 5k marathon, that 10,000 steps challenge, the 100 words per day writing challenge etc by taking you far away to la-la land…remind yourself that its just the hundreds of voices that you have heard all your life, telling you that you are not as good as the other person. So what…FUCK them others…fuck the Ego…

…and just START!

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