Step 24: Sacrifice
Photo courtesy of Unsplash / Aidan Granberry
Today it's all about sacrifice. Sacrificing on the altar of consciousness, Aztec style, with the knife of your attention span whilst they lay rigid and comatose 'cuz you drugged them, you drugged them good and everyone's praying because blood for the creative blood god so sacrifice...Hearthstone. Or toy soldiers in my case.
One of my favorite human beings is my friend Justin. I see him a few times a week to workout, but periphery to that is the solid wisdom this guy drops as casually as prompting me to open my legs when I squat.
He talked about sacrifice today. And opening my legs more.
Sacrifice, in the context of strength training to begin with. After a certain point of quick increases in muscle mass for a newbie- myself being one, what happens next involves commitment and sacrifice. Sacrificing time. Sacrificing other crap you enjoy. Even sacrificing to eat- eat more, but eat precisely, force yourself to get over that urge to *avoid* food, to sate your desire for pleasure because in this day and age we live in a pleasure filled universe, literally at our finger tips, and sacrifice is no longer popular. It's no longer a part of our culture.
I'm paraphrasing him here, but his point resonated with me in the context of writing these three books in three months.
Today, I burned two and a half hours in the morning doing I don't even know what. I think I was looking at army lists for this miniature game I'm into. What that means is I was looking at statistics and doing little dice simulations for a strategy game you play with toy soldiers. Like maths.
It's an awesome game, but boom- I might have even lost three hours. I wasn't playing it. I wasn't painting it. I was barely reading about it. No, I was doing maths related to it.
Because this gives me pleasure.
Playing, thinking about, painting these miniatures- It's one of the few things I still do that I would say I do for sheer pleasure. I rarely watch any shows since starting the three books, I try to read or listen to audiobooks when I'm on the move and count listening to music on the MTR commute as an indulgence. I write till I'm too tired to continue at night.
This is not because I'm a disciplined, driven individual. Far from it. I'm a regular example of undisciplined- present creative marathon excluded.
There are a few ways to look at motivation. There are the positive ways, the self-help book PUMP IT! DO IT! Better, faster, stronger- the adding on of reasons, of routines, of habits- the accumulation of skills. I would say that's the vast majority of advice and strategy when it comes to getting things done. How to do more.
Whereas sacrifice is about subtraction. When I first started this project, I cut out all video games and addictive TV shows. I uninstalled every game for the first time in...I can't even remember. I'm not anyone special, I'm just a regular dude who enjoys regular, usually geeky things.
I subtracted. "Sacrificed." Nothing grand, just things I did for pleasure. Meaningless dopamine hits that ate up my time, attention and left me craving more of the same.
The more I subtract, the more clear the work becomes. The more time I have, the more focus. I can't crave that which I've consciously decided to have no more of. Subtraction. Everyone's got their pleasures. In a world like ours, with Netflix, Amazon, and all the rest- whatever our poison, we get it. Nothing wrong with that in of itself. I'm no stoic.
But as a step towards completing this thing, I'm going to consciously sacrifice more. Starting with sacrificing thinking way too much about my toy soldiers. And painting 'em. Seriously, I love that shit.
It's a small, regular guy kind of thing, I'm not taking a vow of chastity. But I am an addict of pleasure and distraction. Video games, TV shows, board games, card games- whatever- always had a thing for games. Work expands to fill the time allotted to it, well nowadays entertainment expands to fill the time left over.
There's something freeing about consciously choosing to sacrifice a pleasure.
Rather than 'working more', it's a matter of saying I'm no longer going to partake in that of my own volition.
Try it out.
If there's something you're pursuing, instead of trying to do more, choose to consciously subtract something else.
You might find yourself switching to a new pleasure to fill it's place, but keep going. Keep subtracting. Instead of "if you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe, then you'll be successful", try "If you want to succeed, sacrifice something for it." Enjoy the freedom of choosing to give something up. Not being forced to by circumstance or work. Choose what you sacrifice.
Like a goat. A black goat. Get them entrails out.
This isn't exactly sage wisdom, but it's what's been on my mind tonight, thanks to Justin. That and getting halfway through Steven King's On Writing and reaching the lovely, lovely section where he says that writing's essentially telepathy.
Also, I wrote 5K today, which is pretty neat, but the next three days I've gotta go into some kind of insane writing binge, because I got like two more weeks to complete this fantasy novel.