I wonder, most nights, when I go to bed, how I am doing in Life. By conventional standards, I am a bit of a failure. I have good kids, and I haven’t spent more than a night in jail, and I pay my bills, and no one can say I screwed them over, but I should probably be a professor somewhere.
Last night I said to myself, well, I’ve lived a life of courage. I haven’t given up. I have done my best to decide what is important and what is not, and pursue the important. What I think is important is personal growth, emotional soundness, peace of mind, the ability to love easily and openly, resilience, wisdom and depth.
And like a typical American, I want those things NOW. I wonder why I am not farther yet. But I think most people never honestly START on this path. I have been stumbling, crawling–sometimes on my belly–falling off the path and getting back on, sometimes laying for a night or a week or a month flat on my back thinking I can’t go on but getting back up eventually, all of this, for a long, long time. Failure is when you quit. It is not when you hurt so much you can’t focus.
And it hit me that there is a relative 100% you can give. It is like Relative Humidity. The amount of moisture air can hold is relative to its temperature. The warmer it gets, the more moisture it will hold. When it is very cold, it does not hold very much. Very cold days up north in the winter have a feel and a sound to them. It gets quiet, to where the air itself always felt to me like it was crackling. It feels like you could hear a bird chirp 100 yards away like it was next to you. This is moisture free air.
And emotionally, if you are giving until it hurts sometimes, and giving at least a bit past your comfort zone regularly, daily, then that is your relative 100%.
And I look at kids nowadays, and their 100% is not very much. But it is what it is. And they themselves are keenly conscious of their own unhappiness, their own weakness, and so I would suggest that for most of them working daily to build a better 100% would be a salutary practice.
But you can’t ask from anyone more than they have. There is no 110% if you define relative 100% accurately. If you ask more, they will dissociate. They will disconnect. They will stop trying. This is human nature, wired into all of us.