Back at the beginning of October, I got sick with some crud that one of the kids brought home from school.
This plague knocked me on my back, and I mean literally in bed half-delirious with a fever for several days. While I was spaced out, I wasn’t in the year 2025 for awhile. I had some nasty flashbacks to a few momentous events and bad choices that I made when I was a younger man. I’ve never in my life felt such an explosion of pent-up guilt and remorse and sadness.
I won’t speculate here about what (or who) caused this, but it sure felt like karma turning up with a long overdue bill. I won’t say more than that in public, but it rattled me big time. I mean that some important things broke inside and shifted around in such a way that I am not the same after. It’s a few months later and I’m still working through what it all meant.
Even though what I just described doesn’t sound pleasant (and living it was worse) there’s been a tremendous upside.
Telling yourself the truth may be the most terrible thing your can do to yourself, but it’s necessary.
The ego does not like to see the truth. It likes the comfy lies and illusions it weaves around itself.
If you allow them, these lies will ruin anything good in your life.
Few things are a greater relief than facing up to repressed negativity (when you didn’t even know you were holding on to it) and finally letting go of it after decades.
There’s a power in letting yourself see and experience your reality as it is.
That was the moment when all this training and dieting I’m doing now clicked into place. The flywheel started to turn and now there’s a clarity and momentum to what I am doing.
I’m back here writing and coaching now because of this episode.
This all got me thinking about an idea which, as far as I know, was cooked up by the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard, who is called the father of existentialism.
It goes like this:
Our society is so caught up in its delusions of reason and rationality that we downplay or ignore the experience of being alive, right here and right now, with a world of things that matter to us.
If you want to escape the lies and deceptions of your greedy ego, you just think about it real hard.
Well. We see how that works out for people who are overweight, unhealthy, and otherwise living in the trap of an unwanted body, don’t we?
Thinking real hard about it leads often enough to paralysis and inaction, not commitment and decisive change.
It isn’t detached rationality that makes the difference.
Breaking free from an unwanted life happens in response to an emotional experience that shakes us out of the hypnotic trance of day to day routine.
Here’s how one source describes this existentialist flourish:
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World-shattering moods open me up to the possibility of being authentic, of accepting and affirming the unsettling givens of my condition, of being released from distractions and trivialities, and of recognizing the self-defining projects that matter to me as an individual.
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A crisis of the kind I had is no fun to live through… but it provides an opportunity to grow and change for the better.
What really matters to you? What parts of yourself and your life do you hate, but hang on to out of habit?
What do you really want for yourself?
These are questions we don’t think about near enough.
There is clarity and emotional fuel in even asking them.
Failure to be in this mode of thinking…
…which what authenticity really means…
…is why so few of us ever commit to change and see it through.
When an opportunity comes your way, grab hold of it and don’t let go. I missed out on so many good things in life because I did not see or understand this. Seeing and seizing these moments life offers us is how the flywheel starts to move in the right direction and build momentum.
I don’t know if this helps you at all. It may not even make sense to you.
By talking up feelings and emotions and moods over Pure Reason, I am committing a heresy to the Smart Boys which is probably far worse than my sins of telling people to deadlift with a rounded back and squat to a max every day.
My crazy ideas have a long track record of turning out to be right in the long run.
If your results matter to you, I humbly suggest paying attention.
Best way to do that? Be close to where I am, in the community I’m growing around my ideas on vitality and flourishing.
It’s yours for the taking. You only have to click the link.
Matt Perryman