Fast and easy

You can have it now, but is it really what you want?

When I first opened my laptop to start working on this newsletter that you're now reading, I was squeezed into the last row of a budget flight, heading home to Singapore from Bangkok.

Nothing about that week of my life had gone according to plan: I had originally visited Klang in Malaysia to stay with a friend, and we had plans to take the train up to Hat Yai, Hua Hin, then Bangkok. I last made this same train journey in 2015, and was really looking forward to doing it again.

Then my friend dropped out of the trip due to a family emergency, and I tested positive for Covid. I was so sick that I cancelled my train travel and booked a flight to Bangkok instead, hoping I might at least salvage a few days to traipse around old bookstores, drink coffee, and eat street food.

But it was not to be, and I figured I'd much rather recuperate from the comfort of my own bed. So I booked a flight home, and never in my life have I ever felt more relieved to sink back into the sticky embrace of our tropical humidity.

That was over 6 weeks ago. As I make some final edits before hitting publish, I can't help thinking, "It shouldn't have taken me so long to write this stupid newsletter."

In Season 2 of Apple TV's The Morning Show, there's a scene where Alex Levy, played by Jennifer Aniston, attempts to convince her colleagues that she’s now a different person. After pulling a stunt on national television that threw her broadcast network into disarray, she'd vanished to a cabin in Maine, supposedly to lie low, spend time alone, and write her autobiography. In this scene, she's just returned, both to the show and to a much icier reception than expected.

At one point almost pleading with them, she insists that she's been working on herself "for the last 8 months" and "done lots of therapy". But as the audience, we see that she hasn't changed one bit.

She's defensive and won't listen to the criticism levelled at her. When confronted with very specific truths of her behaviour, she sprints for the hotel elevator instead of sticking around to listen. In every subsequent episode, we see her slowly unravelling as she seeks to blame, deflect, and exact retribution from others—all to avoid confronting the ways in which she herself has been responsible for the implosion of her own life.

As I finished one episode after the next, watching Alex's behaviour escalate to intensifying levels of desperation, I thought about all the times I too believed that everything was finally going to be okay and amazing because I had "done the work".

I would find myself believing this despite also understanding that change takes time. Startup founders who leave their first company can spend years attempting to reorient their lives. In a lot of the organisational work I've done, I've seen firsthand how truly meaningful organisational change never follows any kind of pre-determined timeline.

Several months ago, I found myself saying to my therapist, "I don't know why it took me this long, but I get it now." We had not been talking about anything particularly new, and throughout much of the 3 and a half years I've been in therapy, a lot has gone well and I've had plenty to be grateful for. Even so, I experienced a moment of such sharp clarity it was like I had finally drawn the curtain to let the light in, only to realise I'd been stuck in a room, and the room had a door, and I could open it, and I could leave. Everything lined up, and it all made sense.

All this had taken was 3 years of talking about the same thing over and over again, and for life to confront me with truths I could no longer ignore.

There's a quote I love from Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, where Lori Gottlieb writes, "Before successful therapy, it’s the same damn thing over and over. After successful therapy, it’s one damn thing after another." She reminds us that we may get a handle on the thing that first brought us to the therapist's couch, but that doesn't mean our work is concluded. To be alive is to experience pain and loss, yet if we welcome growth as an ongoing, never-ending odyssey, suffering becomes optional.

At the same time, it is precisely this ongoing, never-endingness that is so goddamn hard. Because I haven't always realised that whenever I've said something is taking longer than it should, what I really mean is that it's taking longer than I think it should.

“The reason we’re so increasingly intolerant of long articles and why we skim them, why we skip forward even in a short video that reduces a 300-page book into a three-minute animation—is that we’ve been infected with this kind of pathological impatience that makes us want to have the knowledge but not do the work of claiming it.”

Maria Popova

I've been thinking a lot about how knowledge is useful, but it is really experience that teaches us.

As I begin deepening my coaching practice and working with more clients, I've witnessed the ways in which we can be proficient at deconstructing and analysing our problems, and yet still be helplessly incapable of creating the change we want to see in our lives. It's one thing to know the right answer, and quite something else to apply it.

I see this most clearly in my own process of learning that in order to let things take the time they need, it's not about being patient. It's about being present.

While I know exactly what Eckhart Tolle means when he talks about living in the now and not through memory and anticipation; about how the now is so challenging because the past gives us an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, it doesn't mean I'm suddenly adept at resisting the impulse to rush, to do, to compel the universe, all so I can finally arrive—even if I no idea where exactly it is I want to arrive at.

Someone asked me the other day, "Is this boredom or is this peace?" And I wanted to reply, "Fuck if I know." But I am also starting to notice when I'm reaching for distractions or shortcuts, and finding it possible to pause; to ask myself what I'm grasping for, what I'm trying to avoid, why I so badly need for something to be happening right now.

For me at least, it's never just about the waiting. It is also about the uncertainty of not knowing what's going to happen; the belief that for every second that something isn't going well, it must be going badly.

I was unpacking this very belief when another thought occurred to me: what if when I say I want something fast, what I really mean is that I want it easy?

After all, it is very clear to me what the fast and easy approach looks like in situations where I'm feeling restless/impatient,

FAST AND EASY: Do anything and everything possible to get the thing I want—even if they don't feel right or are not aligned with who I am—just so I can stop feeling these difficult feelings.

HARD AND WILL TAKE HOWEVER LONG IT NEEDS TO TAKE: Do the work to figure out why I believe these things about the world to be true, so I can finally be free from these patterns of thinking.

And I have a choice. Do I choose the quick fix or the deep internal work and the uncomfortable behavioural change?

So as I round off this week's newsletter, here's what I'm working towards: finding that balance between appreciating that most things will take longer than I want them to, but today is still an opportunity to do something; to do differently; to do whatever I can to make progress towards the supposedly important thing. And sometimes, even doing nothing can mean progress, because I'd much rather do nothing than give in to what's fast and easy.

If there's anything I've learned, it's this. Every time in my life that I've rushed, I've always gotten the thing I thought I wanted, regardless of whether it was right or healthy for me. But in instances where I've been able to accept the process, do things for the right reasons, and let time work its magic, life has always worked out in some profound way that I could never have foreseen.

2023 is almost over, and as more and more people start talking about slowing down and being present, my hope is that we appreciate what it really means to do so.

As I recently asked someone I've been working with—

Are you slowing down to lose yourself in distractions? Only to start rushing again in the new year?

Or, are you slowing down—

To check if you're heading in the right direction?

To assess what hasn't been working, and what you want to start doing differently?

To see if the people that you love and want in your life are still next to you?

To appreciate how far you've come this year (or in your life)?

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