The Virtue of Just Showing Up

I heard a radio personality a couple of years back speak about how he has been going to the gym for years.  Considering that many people fail to commit to the gym so faithfully, someone asked him his secret for his longstanding consistency.  And his answer might come as a shock, but it really shouldn’t.  He said that he just kept showing up.  He made it a point to make it to the gym at a certain time and day.  And he always went, even when he didn’t feel like it.

I find the anecdote inspiring.  I see this as the central virtue of my journey from my job into unjobbing.  How?  By doing something every day to bring me one step closer to my unjobbing dream.

The journey to unjob requires a development of alternate skills and capabilities so that I can get paid doing something that I like doing.  In order to develop those skills to a professional level, I have to practice.  One way that I have been doing that is waking up around 5:00 so that I can practice writing by working on my book.  Right now, I am editing a book that I wrote a couple of years back and needs some real extra attention.  Some days, I don’t feel like it.  Some days I work on it and can only get through a couple hundred words.  But other days, I can get through over a thousand before I have to get to work.  Some days at the end of the session I feel pumped.  Others, I feel defeated.  But regardless, every day I get up and try again.

By being persistent, even if results aren’t consistent, I will eventually finish.  My last book took about a year of working in the morning in a semi-consistent fashion (I also worked on music and other stuff – but it was always 5:00 in the morning).  When I look at the individual days, it doesn’t feel like a lot and when I am working on it I don’t feel like I am getting anywhere.  It can be quite discouraging.  If I did not feel that I should give writing a fair shot, I could see myself giving up on it a while back.

Similar to the gym, we get better the more we practice.  Whenever anyone first starts lifting weights, they start out light and get tired easily.  Again, there is the temptation to despair and give up.  But, by consistently going to the gym and lifting weights, they develop strength and toned muscles that they never knew they had.  Creative work is nothing different.  With my music, I am making it a point to always work on developing my writing by having a steady stream of projects.  For example, I have decided to write music for all 150 Psalms.  That is going to take a while, and will take maybe the rest of my life.  I plan on working on these in between other projects, but it gives me something that I can consistently practice my writing.

This virtue of just showing up also helps keep my perfectionism in balance.  By working on persistently producing and developing my tools, I am less worried about a subpar result.  I think a great example is this blog.  As I am writing this, I don’t feel like it is that great of a post, but I am doing it anyway.  Why?  It will make me a better writer in the long run.  It teaches me to be persistent even when I don’t feel like doing it.

So, even though I am an advocate of just showing up, I haven’t been great at following it here (hence I had to pull some “guest” posts from me back in 2012).  The part of just showing up that makes it work is that you have to have a time and place for you to show up.  If you don’t know when or where to show up, how can you?  I realized that recently with my prison pen pals.  I kept falling behind in writing to them because I didn’t have a consistent time to write to them.  I used to able to do a lot at work no problem.  But now, work is busy (and interesting) and I have an obligation to give my all to that work.  So, that puts me at a crossroads with the blog and drawing.  If I am going to keep doing the blog and working on my drawing, I need to set that time and place.  That will be my goal for the weekend – find my time and place.

In order for us to make any changes to our life, whether they are habits, or jobs, or…whatever – we need to make a consistent effort by just showing up.

God bless,

Sven