System Overload

How many times you’ve started something “without thinking”? How many times you just dived in, thinking that “things will arrange somehow”? How often you embarked on new projects just by passion or enthusiasm, without any type of assessment? I know I did it a lot of times. So often that I was on the verge of completely ditching my assessing and deciding capabilities. I was just doing stuff, imagining that I was carried by “the flow”.

Truth is I was not on the flow. I was completely out of sync. Trying to do so much, but with so little care for my real needs. Just going forward without assessing any of my moves. I remember that every time after a “full” period in my life, something extremely violent happened, usually to my detriment. Every time I was doing “so much” a restraining event came, quite often violently, and drastically restrained my options.

Took me a while to understand this dance of doing too much and then doing too little. But it finally came true: it was just a system overloading situation. The limiting events were in fact there to balance my exaggerated implication in too many projects at once. Some inner positive guardian was activating some switches, telling me: “I’m going to cut the power, Dragos, otherwise, you’re going to blow”.

Overloading Your Life

Whenever you engage in something new you’re overloading your system. Before you’re actually doing something you’ve already put to stress your system: you’re first assessing, and then decide what’s to be done and only after that you really start doing it. That’s the normal sequence. In practice, you’re mainly “doing”, or at least this is what you’re perceiving. Because you put your Assess and Decide stages on auto pilot. And that’s bad.

Even worse, if you’re doing more than it’s useful for you, if you’re taking on your plate more than you can realistically do, you’re going to get some crashes every now and then. It’s like a computer giving you the blue screen of death. Only it will be in the form of a psychological depression, physical illness, or some sort of addiction. Anything that will balance a little the stress you’re putting on your system.

Spontaneity

Just diving in, without too much “thinking”, it’s fantastic from a “spontaneity” perspective. It’s easier to get tricked by this viewpoint and find an excuse for not thinking your moves just for the sake of spontaneity. Although both words are starting with the letter “S” there is a big difference between spontaneity and stupidity. For me, spontaneity means “going with the flow”, stupidity means “going with their flow”.

In other words, spontaneity is a way of reacting to events by following your intuition (which is part of your assessment tools) and engaging in an action which resonates with your values, without giving it the benefit of rational doubt. Sometimes it’s great to go based on a hunch, on an intuition, without thinking too much.

But there’s a little bit of a subtle difference between not thinking and not assessing. You can assess without thinking, by using just your intuition. In this case, intuition is just another tool you use. Sometimes thinking will bring you the best results, sometimes intuition or other types of assessment. But the bottom line is if you’re really spontaneous you’re still assessing your actions, by using your intuition. If you’re just “going with the flow”,  without any type of assessment, mimicking intuition for the sake of being in somebody else’s flow, with all due respect, but you’re stupid.

Adaptation

So much for the spontaneity and stupidity, let’s get back to our overflow paradigm. Every time you’re putting something new on your plate, you’re overloading your system. That something could be anything: learning something new, changing career, entering a new relationship, whatever. Every new activity is a system overloader, it adds something to your current state. Usually, it adds something stressful.

Even if the change is beneficial to you, the stress will be there. In fact, every change is stressful, in the sense that it requires an adaptation period. You can’t really skip this. You may try to avoid it, you may try different escaping techniques, but it can’t be tricked.

Adaptation is a way of adjusting your internal vibration to match the vibrations of your external context. Unless you’re having a similar frequency, you’re not in sync. You can’t pretend you’re playing a sonata, while the Universe is playing a fugue. It just won’t match.

Adaptation is usually the biggest energy consumer in every change you’re involved. And if you’re constantly putting to much on your schedule, if you’re constantly trying to change your environment , your adaptation period will eventually run out of energy.  And a violent event will enter the scene in order to re-balance everything. You’re going to experiment another “system ”overloaded“ message.

Reboot Every Now And Then

Back when I had my online publishing business I was using Linux powered servers to host my sites. I was so proud when I looked at the log and see something like: “this system up and running for 234 days, 18 hours and 3 minutes”. To keep a server without a restart or reboot so long is usually a good sign. Uninterrupted functionality is critical for an online business.

Somehow, I started to mimic this behavior. Keeping an uninterrupted functionality flow for months, or even years was perceived like something good, the same way a server was doing. I was taking pride in it. I haven’t had a single holiday during my first 3 years of entrepreneurship and I even bragged about it. Unless I was not a computer. And every now and then I had to face some crash.

We’re an incredibly delicate and powerful energy manipulation machine. We’re so much better and infinitely complicated than a computer, which does a single job tremendously well: it stays up and serve sites. We’re doing so much more. We’re not supposed to stay up and serve clients uninterruptedly. This is why we invented computers in the first way, to do that for us.

We’re supposed to enjoy, to give, to receive, to love, to experience, to invent.

And we really can’t do that if we don’t reinvent ourselves every once in a while.

Make yourself a service and reboot your system every now and then.

To Have Versus To Be

Our modern society has only two major mindsets, and those are: “to have” and “to be”. “To have” is the mindset which favors acquisitions, possessions, control, disruption. “To be” is the mindset which favors enjoyment, detachment, freedom and continuity. Throughout our lives we bounce back and forth from one mindset to another. At some point, “to have” seems more important and it’s preferred. Sometimes we chose more “to be” rather than “to have”.

The world we live in has a huge shift towards the “to have” mindset. Every social structure is designed in such a way that it will support acquisition or a form of control. Every definition of success is based on a number of possessions. Almost every form of value creation is based on a form of control and disruption. The “to have” mindset is ubiquitous. It’s so present that we forgot how “to be”.

Limited Versus Continuous

When you have something, you have it only for a limited period of time. The moment you started to have that thing, time will start its destructive action and the thing will start to decay. Every economic theory will state the fact that there is a devalorisation of things based on the time we’ve had possession over them. You can have a thing only for a limited period of time.

On the other hand, being is continuous. By choosing “to be” and not to have, you detach from the time bounding and enjoy your present second. If you obey to the “to have” mindset, you can have a beautiful thing for some time and then try to recreate the feeling by buying another similar one. But if you’re in the “to be” mindset you can be in joy regardless of any other external hook. You don’t need “to have” material incentives if you are just being. Happiness is not bounded.

Past Or Future Versus Present

When you have something you have it only in the past. You may have the illusion that you have it in the present moment but each second that thing will change. Mostly to decay. You cannot really have something in the present moment, it’s impossible. All of your possessions are in the past. All you have is in the past and all you will have is in the future. In the present moment there is only a presence, you.

When you chose “to be” you chose to live in the present. You can’t live in he past or in the future, you can only be in this present second. This second is all you have. You can’t be in the past, because the past doesn’t exist anymore and you can’t be in the future because the future doesn’t yet exist. Having something is always in the past, being is always in the present. (more…)