As I was finishing up last week’s post, The High Cost of Ignoring Friction, I realized I wasn’t just ignoring work-related friction. I was also ignoring friction in other areas of my life—a set of recurring problems I’d been (not so) quietly ignoring for years, with a common thread: their status is not what I’d like it to be. I also noticed I was responding to them in similar ways.
I was ignoring friction in my finances. I was consistently spending more than I budgeted for, key relationships were not where I wanted or needed them to be, and I was ignoring friction in my creative pursuits as well. In all these areas, I knew there was a problem, but I kept ignoring it—hoping it would go away, hoping it would magically resolve itself—but it didn’t. I knew what I was doing wasn’t producing the results I wanted (or needed), but I didn’t know what else to do, so I kept doing the same things over and over. I was caught in a perpetual loop I couldn’t see, and I didn’t know how to get out of it.
My first response was to blame—usually myself, but sometimes the situation or another party involved. Next, I’d think and/or research the f*%k out of it, and lastly, I’d take some kind of action based on what I thought was logical, without noticing whether it was working. This was my loop: blame, think/research, and take action—hoping it would work, but getting frustrated when it didn’t. No wonder they kept recurring.
I know I need to break the pattern—step outside the loop—I simply can’t continue. No matter how hard I want them to, recurring problems don’t “go away.” They do not magically disappear, and they are not like wine—they do not get better with age. At times, they like to create the illusion that they’ve gone away, lulling me into a false sense of safety, but in truth, they are just hiding, lurking in the shadows, ready to strike when I least expect it.
And they also feel like weight—not heavy like a barbell, but a sneaky weight that slowly builds up over time, settling on my neck and shoulders until one day I wake up to find it has accumulated. And now I’m walking slightly hunched over, and it’s difficult to turn my neck to either side. They are also incredible resource drains, especially attention, drawing it away from other endeavors like an energy vampire.
There’s another piece of this I don’t know how to handle—acceptance. I have an extremely difficult time accepting situations that aren’t the way I want them to be. Acceptance feels like giving up or giving in, and that doesn’t sit well with me. Every time I’ve tried to “accept” something, it leaves a bitter taste in my mouth that I can’t get rid of no matter how many times I try to rinse it out. I don’t want an acceptable job, acceptable relationships, or an acceptable life—I want them to be meaningful and fulfilling. Acceptable sounds like a sarcastic “fine”—I’m ok, everything is “fine”—it sounds like bullshit.
There’s another form of difficulty surrounding acceptance—accepting that my actions contributed to the situation. At first, I thought of this as a bad thing and wanted to punish and blame myself, but the more I look at it, the more I realize it’s actually a good thing—I’m increasing my self-awareness. I’m developing the ability to recognize my contribution. Recognizing it gives me agency. Perhaps the more difficult thing I’m struggling with is that, no matter how much I want a situation to be a certain way, sometimes it “is what it is” and is beyond my control. This is especially hard when I desperately want something to be a certain way.
The more I think and write about these recurring situations, two words keep popping up—balance and alignment. I don’t think I want balance. While balance seems like a nice-to-have, I don’t think the areas of my life will ever be in perfect balance—each occupying equal slices of the pie. One or maybe two areas will probably always be fighting for the center stage. What I don’t want is for one area to get, or seem, so far out of whack that it steals all my resources from others. I think what I’m looking for is alignment—something along the lines of each area supporting or at least not clashing with the others.