🪖 TREE 557: Fight less. Live more.

It’s not a war unless you want it to be

19 months ago, I declared an end to hostility. I decided I would no longer use violent metaphors to think and talk about personal growth. I wrote then that my thinking was work in progress. Today, I’m sharing some progress.

Nixon declared war on cancer.
Reagan started a war on drugs.
Bush 2 dragged us into a war on terror.

There’s this idea in the English-speaking world that if it’s not a war, it’s not important. So we have a tendency to turn everything we do into a battle. We fight

• fat

• calories

• to get out of bed

• to be active

• traffic

• crowds

• disease

• addiction – I’ve never been addicted to anything stronger than caffeine, so I won’t try and speak to that other than to note that the language in the 12 steps of the recovery movement (Alcoholics Anonymous and its offspring) is of active surrender to a higher power. It’s cooperation, not war.

• social media – I read post a few days ago in which a moderately popular personal growth blogger told me to fight the algorithm. WT actual F?! Why would I fight an algorithm?

• to create, to carry on through the difficult middle, to finish – Steven Pressfield wrote The War of Art. I’m very grateful to him. Because of that book, I found the ability to finish projects. Then Elizabeth Gilbert came along and showed me a bigger world in which creation is not an act of war but of curiosity and cooperation.

What if you didn’t fight all those things? What I mean is, what if you still exercised, ate well, got healthy and created your art but you didn’t think about it as a fight? Not every difficult thing is a war. Not everything that is called a war is as hard as we make it sound. And certainly a thing doesn’t have to be a war to be important.

It seems to me that if people didn’t go around treating big parts of their lives at wars, then, at the very least, they would be a lot less tired.

The voices in Martin’s head weren’t gone; they’d just gone silent.

Float. (BTW have you watched Janelle Monae on Sesame Street? It’s probably the most inspirational thing you’ll see all day.)

Grow slowly
Jeff