Heavy, Leaky Jars
I’ve talked about this idea before, but let’s be clear.
A lot of those things you call goals, a lot of your desires are simply heavy, leaky jars. ‘Leaky’ because as Liam Hounsell puts it, you keep trying to fill them but they don’t stay full.
‘Heavy’ because they take huge energy to carry, to lug around. As such, they burden your existence.
Take the young man who desperately wants to be a famous business CEO.
By holding up such a goal, the boy immediately becomes less than his ideal self. From the outset, he is doomed. All due to his perspective, he must now judge himself to be an inferior version of himself.
He thinks things like, in ten years time I’ll definitely be a CEO. Ahh, the Expectations Trap. If he is not a CEO by then, he will be even more down on himself. If he is, and his pursuit of this job has been superficial, then it won’t live up to his expectations.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Then there’s the ‘famous’ part.
What if he is a CEO, but a mediocre one? Say, CEO of the family barn. Then this type of CEO goes to great effort to glamorise and gloss-up his simple role, burdened by the search for validation and attention.
This is just a starter, a teaser, a small insight into the heavy-lifting, effort, and psychological hard work that goes into carrying such a heavy and leaky jar. Hard work, filling your unhealthy desires.
But so many people have so many of these jars
Lugging them around, a heavy and burdensome existence. You can forgive them for looking for fulfilment, for searching and pining for something that can make them feel complete. But they don’t realise that they are carrying the emptiness.
That it is the idea which is heavy and hollow. It is not something to be filled, it is something to be dropped. Only then would their existence become light, breezy and effortless.
Why is dropping hard?
It takes time to accept that you have been carrying the emptiness the whole time. This is a bitter realisation. You have grown attached to the jar because you have spent so long looking to fill it.
It also takes trust. You are scared to drop it like you are scared to jump into the water. It has become part of you, so you have grown scared to let it go.
Re-condition. Re-program. Embrace lightness.
