Pee In The Drinking Fountain

Posted by parkejladd on Jun 30, 2010 in Featured {Article}, Slider | 4 comments

Opportunities to give in to fear and live life enslaved to worry, sprout up throughout life and may, at times, seem like excellent reasons to stay put and not do anything too awfully drastic. If we fight our fears we may end up seeing the real face of them, and the fear of that usually keeps the majority of us right where we are—comfortable and bored. Steven Pressfield describes this phenomenon as fighting the resistance. In his book, The War of Art, Pressfield states that, “Resistance has no strength of its own. Every ounce of juice it possesses comes from us. We feed it with power by our fear of it.”

Seth Godin writes about the resistance in his book, Linchpin, and Donald Miller writes from a personal point of story about resistance in his latest, A Million Miles in A Thousand Years. All three of these books are excellent, and one of the main points to grasp is that the fear of progression or accomplishing anything worthwhile is resisted by an internal force that seeks to keep us right where we are—comfortable and bored. There are countless people, happenings and uncontrollable events which drive us down the wide road of anxiety. I think about this often when it comes to drinking fountains precariously positioned directly outside of public restrooms. Every time, without fail, while sipping from one of these stainless steel beasts, someone still in the restroom flushes the toilet, and the water pressure decreases as my lips lose contact with the spew. My mind assumes, of course, that somehow the water which I’m currently drinking and the water which I was previously peeing in are somehow intimately connected and shared. This is not the type of thought that bodes well for me continuing to drink from public drinking fountains, but I suppose it’s still far better than adding to the land fills with bottled water.

Exaggerated thinking has a lot to do with fear. As humans we tend to deal in extremes. We’ll live through it or we’ll die; we’ll be rich or completely poor; success is impacting millions for good or successful we are not. There is only excellence and everything else that falls short of excellence. Our culture is consumed with exaggerated thinking and results—that the worst thing will always happen, and you’ll never be able to recover once it does. We want to see results, and for many projects, results are exactly what we need. We need you to stand up, start, finish and achieve great results.

But then there is life. For many years we’ve been taught that our lives should reflect our work habits and our lives are only about results, exaggerated outcomes based on what the socially chosen few deem appropriate and successful. But life is about more than just socially acceptable results, isn’t it. It’s about more than just the outcome, for the outcome is dictated by what happens along the way. Getting to heaven is about more than booking the flight and waiting in line. It’s about all those other people bumping into us, knocking our luggage over as they search for their chosen flight. Life is about the transformative process, choosing what to embrace and what to discard based upon what we find valuable and hope to hold on to when our eyes shut, lungs stop expanding, and hearts stop beating; when the plane takes flight and there’s no looking back. Miller states that it’s about the story, creating events and placing them on blank pages so your life is actually worth reading, worth sharing—not comfortable, not boring.

“I’m at point A, and someday I’ll get to point B. That’s where I need to get in order to finally achieve happiness,” you say to yourself. Somehow, if you get to a certain income level, your life will finally be secure, and you’ll smile again, spend time with your kids, and kiss your wife goodbye in the morning. Someday you won’t have to work from a bookstore and drink pee-infested water from a public drinking fountain. Someday you’ll get there, and then life will be easy, perfect and beautiful. Someday you’ll stop worrying, and anxiety will be a thing of the past not a thing focused on the past.

For years we’ve been taught this. We’ve been inundated with commercialism, materialism and consumerism. We’ve been told by countless organizations and corporations that the way we’re currently living isn’t good enough. We need more of everything. We need a new iPhone because the one we currently have doesn’t allow us to properly multi-task while playing video games; we need new clothes because the one’s we’re currently wearing are out of style; we need bigger houses because the one’s we’re currently living in aren’t spacious enough for modern-day, sedentary kids who need two play rooms, a flat screen TV, Wii and personal mini fridge for their juice boxes. We’ve been duped.

The path is gone. Well, it’s not gone, but we’ve allowed the clutter of life to cover it with asphalt, advertisements and TV. The adventure that is right now is blinding, but our $200 Ray Ban Wayfarers keep us from seeing the true light. Result oriented lives are focused only on what will be and not on what is. We exchanged hiking the trail for occasionally glancing at the map. We sacrificed life and love and joy for false security and social networking. We traded our present moments for hopeful ones that may never come. We believed that exchanging our current time today for whatever it was we hoped to attain would one day pay us back. We think we’re focused on getting better when most of the time we’re just consumed with getting more.

And your life is more than what you own, the blog you write or the job you hold. One day, Peter and John, two men who spent a lot of time walking and talking with Jesus, were going to the temple to pray, and they came upon a crippled man who was asking passersby for money. When they heard the man ask them for some coin, they stopped. Acts states that they “looked straight at him.” In other words, Peter and John were fully dedicated to the moment. Their aim was to go to the temple and spend some serious time praying, but they were not so focused on that end that they lost sight of the current moment occurring all around them. They gave their full attention to the cripple and, in return, demanded his. Peter told the beggar, “Silver or gold I do not have, but what I have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk.” And the crippled beggar got up and walked. His feet and ankles were immediately strengthened, and he spent the next moments of his life jumping and walking and praising God. I’m willing to bet that the formerly crippled man was no longer spending his every waking hour concentrated on obtaining coin. Those worry filled days were over.

I used to focus on getting to the place where I could pray; to the temple to spend time doing what I thought was best. It didn’t matter how fast I had to drive to get there or who I had to launch over along the way, I just had to get there. I enjoyed the summit, topping out, reaching the pinnacle and looking down on the world beneath my blistered toes. The summit was my aim, and I’d enjoy the view when I got to the top. I couldn’t understand Jesus’ habit of praying on mountainsides instead of mountain tops. Maybe he understood something about the journey that I had yet to realize. Maybe I was simply so consumed by the end result that I lost sight of the process along the way.