Commitment: All It Asks of You Is Everything

"It turns out that freedom isn’t an ocean you want to spend your life in. Freedom is a river you want to get across so you can plant yourself on the other side—and fully commit to something.” 
— David Brooks

The 'progressing' world teaches us to keep one foot out of our lives to stay connected to an endless vortex of choices.

These choices masquerade as freedom while they sit at the center of our personal and collective crises.

Choice presents the option to decide. A decision is a commitment to something. 

I find that commitment is vastly misunderstood.

One reason for this is that many of us grew up drowning in the toxic seas of dead commitments.

We watched lifeless marriages devoid of choice and evolution—propped up by the cracked foundations of adherence to doing what's best for the children, to organized religion, or some other disembodied value.

We observed and perhaps even took part in lifeless jobs. Corporate structures demand every ounce of your life force in exchange for the illusory assurance of security and a distant promise of a comfortable retirement.

We witness and inadvertently contribute to the decline of our faltering financial systems. Worlds with original intentions of democracy and freedom are insidiously taken hostage and controlled by fear, pain, and scarcity.

These examples unveil a broader pattern. 

Our choices all too easily become entangled in disorganized extremes. This entanglement leads to a separation from our true nature and, by extension, from nature itself.

Nature is fully engaged.

Looking closely, engagement is not driven by overdoing it or utter avoidance. It is the byproduct of artful communication or simply flow. 

The hard truth is that overcommitting and chronic avoidance are both byproducts of the shadows of commitment. 

Humanity lives in the throes of these shadows. 

Why would you commit to something when your history is riddled with exhaustion, chaos, resentment, and confusion?

This great misunderstanding is enough to leave entire generations thinking that endless choices, hollow freedom, and total defiance are the better paths.

Dead commitments have brought us to this place. And, paradoxically, turning towards the face of Death with a capital d will get us out of it.

In Latin, the root of the word ‘decide’ quite literally means death. Because that's what deciding is—a willingness to kill off all other potentials in the name of one.

We live in a world that does everything in its power to avoid the wisdom of Death. Death says choose, or you will never feel alive. Commit, or you will never experience completion. Sacrifice something or you will never know satisfaction. 

Embracing commitment as sentient is akin to journeying across a metaphorical bridge, a place where a symbolic death occurs — the end of old ways and the birth of new resolve. 

We have endless ways to avoid this crossing.

We keep one foot off, preventing us from ever crossing. From there, we hastily conclude that the journey is futile, retreating back to the world of parasitic choices, where familiar confusion and chaos reign supreme.

We get to the middle, come face-to-face with the discomfort we’ve long evaded, and turn around. 

We arm ourselves with binoculars, trying to discern the distant shore from a safe distance. Engrossed in predicting every imaginable outcome, we remain immobilized, never venturing forward.

We stand on one side of the bridge, warning others about the boneyards of dead commitment that we believe lies beyond. “You'll be trapped… you’ll lose all freedom… why venture forth when everything we desire seems to lie right here?”

Getting to the other side of the bridge is uncommon.

Why would one unwilling to turn towards the fundamental nature of limitation be granted access to limitlessness?

Anyone who crosses the bridge can do their best to explain the experience on the other side. But words will always fall short.

The other side of the bridge contains, quite simply, everything.

If I had not found the grail on the other side of this bridge before birthing my business, you wouldn't be getting this email right now.

I would have quit, or it would have prematurely died—easily.

I wouldn't have engaged the seedling from a place of honesty, which allowed me to recognize the obvious truth that a seed's role is not to feed me, nor should it be expected to.

I wouldn't have had the resilience and adaptability to allow my 'external role' to evolve alongside my inner truth, remaining unwaveringly committed to both.

I wouldn’t have cultivated the connection to the company that has enabled me to discern when greater seasons of tending are required or when less is more.

I wouldn't have had the capability to meet both the difficult and the easy with capacity and respect. 

I wouldn't have stayed in touch with the true algorithm. The wisdom of my ancestors and guides, the quiet whispers from Life, and the compass of my knowing.  

I wouldn’t have honed the ability to deeply listen for what I desire to plant and what Life wants to grow.

These are mere tastes of the breadth of gifts that live on the other side of the bridge. 

Living commitments are the minerals of a new age of CEOs.

The nutrients of stewardship.

Everything you've been taught about what it takes to be a CEO has failed you because that information arose from a mass misunderstanding of commitment.

What if the living library of commitment has been inside you all along?

What if that wisdom is emerging, within and without, for a reason?

Why is Jesus called the shepherd?

And, most of all… how committed are you to finding out?