I read a wonderful piece in Tricycle magazine today about what a spiritual life looks like. The timing for me to read it was perfect. It’s something I’ve been trying to make sense of recently.
We are very much a doing world. Even the language of therapy is often about doing. Everyone seems to come in and say to me, “I need to work on myself,” or “I need to work on my relationships.” The sentiment is understandable. We are a self-improvement culture. Our lives are viewed linearly, our lives a constant striving for self-improvement with a beginning, middle, and end. There is much usefulness in seeing the world this way. It is goal-orientated and results-focused first and foremost. It has helped create the world around us, including the computer I type on now or the smartphone I use to answer my emails and check social media. A lot of us internalize this productive voice and hear it in the daily chatter of our thinking self and assume this is who we are.
“Do you pray?” I once asked a patient.
“No, I’ve never been able to for some reason” she paused. “Do you?”
“No,” I said. “Because I don’t know if anyone is listening.”
It has always struck me as inconceivable that someone is listening to prayer. How can people be sure of some divine force in their lives? Even such Christian luminaries such as Martin Luther King and Mother Theresa experienced their doubts about God. I am no different. God does not speak to me in tongues or voices. All I hear are silent ellipses where I sense holiness in the mundane, the awe-inspiring in the ordinary. God has always seemed like an inelegant, hollow solution to the problem of meaning and death.
Everything's amazing and nobody's happy- Louis C.K.
“To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.”
― Ernest Becker
A few years ago, a patient of mine wondered out loud why he was unhappy. After all he was a successful lawyer, involved in a loving relationship with a partner, lived in one of the nicer neighborhoods in Brooklyn and had a group of close friends whom he saw socially. So what was wrong? "Something just doesn't feel right. I have the gnawing feeling that something should be different," he said.
Recently I’ve been in one of my better creative periods in quite a long time. I have been reading more, as well as writing every day and planning a future podcast. When I noticed how productive I had been, I wasn’t quite sure how it happened.
You see, I was in a rut for awhile. No new projects were being planned. Books were started and unfinished. I was enjoying a few too many beers and not enough time at the gym. I wouldn’t quite call it depression. I had just grown complacent.
It's been awhile, blog. Life has been busy. One of my goals in the near future is to post more, and realistically short, smaller posts are the way to go for now. Speaking of goals...
I've been reading and listening to a lot of articles and podcasts about productivity. One idea that has been helpful is the idea of a SMART goal in Charles Duhigg's "Smarter Faster Better." SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timeline. This differs from a Stretch goal, which I will discuss in another post.
The problem is that a traditional to-do list isn't very useful. It's easy to cross off a bunch of items on your list that are small, easy tasks, leaving you with a sense of accomplishment. But often times, we focus on tasks that don't really apply to what we really want to accomplish daily. Plus a traditional to-do list doesn't give much of a plan on how to achieve something. THE SMART goal is much better way to be productive about the things you care about.
So how does it work? Well let me give you an example. As I said, I want to write more on this blog. Let's use that as an example:
Specific Goal: I will write a blog post once a week for the next two months.
Measurable: It has to be within a Monday-Sunday time frame.
Achievable: If I write for 1-2 hours a week, it is more than achievable.
Realistic: Yes, I think so. If I said 5 blog posts a week, that might not be very realistic.
Timeline: I'd like to work on this goal, 1-2 hours a week on the weekends.
It's as simple as that. It's been very useful for me thus far as well. Next week, I will talk about why the SMART goal isn't enough and introduce the idea of stretch goals.
I'm a psychotherapist in Brooklyn, NY. Please contact me at 347-927-4856 or atsheringlcsw@gmail.com. You can look at my blog brooklyntherapist.net for more information.
