Go easy on the future.

I wrote previously about going easy on yourself, I’m going to wander off in a different direction with this, and let off a little steam about something I’ve been thinking about recently: past and future roles.

We tend to straitjacket ourselves into roles, which when you get down to it are just concepts and conventions, roles which are really defined by our past. As long as we recognise this and don’t fall into the trap of reifying them, I can’t see anything wrong with this, we need to do this to a degree to operate in society.

But when considering our future, should we go with the roles again? Again, to a degree this is necessary to operate, subject to the same caveat as above, see the trap and avoid it.

I think it’s more important to be you performing the role, rather than the role performing you. Let me try and explain it better by example. I wrote SitQuietly not because of some idea about being a so called “great programmer”, I wrote it because of my interest in both meditation and programming. I was looking idly for a project and also couldn’t find the software I wanted, which led to a “That looks like a fun project” moment. My point is it should be a passion, an enjoyment, not an ego trip.

Which comes back to some thing I wrote previously about, not trying to exert ego. If your focus is on being the big “I am”, rather than doing a good job at something you enjoy doing, then you’re not bringing your full potential to bear and you also need to touch base as the role is starting to play you. I remember something Bono mentioned in the book “Bono on Bono”, when he came to particularly difficult record company exec, he worked with them by getting them to remind themselves why they got into the industry in the first place.

OK, let’s bring this one home, as well as going easy on ourselves, I think we need to go easy on the future. Are we doing our thing to be a certain something, because of some imaginary glorious future, like a restless cowboy always riding into the sunset? If that’s how we’re operating, how can we ever be happy, when we place our happiness constantly out of reach then shoot ourselves in the foot trying to get there?