photo by Sergey Shmidt

It’s been a while, right folks?

Since you last heard from me, I assume your world hasn’t been free of political insanity.

To temper what you can’t control, I suggest you read Oliver Burkeman’s archived column “Toxic Preconditions” and claim what you do.

Also take heart, there is one thing you CAN count on: “They cancel spring.” (David Hockney)

Love, Vicki

P.S. I have been working in my art studio more and will soon be posting my latest work on vickipanagotacosart.com. Will let you know when that happens.

Toxic preconditions

by Oliver Burkeman

I was pleased to discover, the other day, the exact phrase for an awful lot of what holds us back from living saner, happier and more meaningfully productive lives: toxic preconditions.

And what’s a toxic precondition? In this post, where I encountered the notion, the social scientist James Horton is exploring why people who’d like to do more writing fail to do that writing. He blames “misguided beliefs about what writing must be, in order to be worth it.” You tell yourself all sorts of things might seem, at first glance, like they’d help you do the activity well: for example, that you should get it right the first time, or that you shouldn’t expend the effort of writing on anything but “high-reward” projects. But the ironic result is that because you’re not confident your writing can meet those requirements, you just don’t write at all, or you do it far less than you otherwise might. Which is, of course, no way to get better at writing.

This isn’t just a problem for writers, either. Toxic preconditions lie in wait everywhere. Consider the ubiquitous modern-day search for the ideal morning routine, featuring the “optimal morning sunlight protocol” and so forth. (Step one: Don’t live in northern England during winter.) It starts off innocently enough, with a list of three or four things you might beneficially do each morning, in order to feel happier and get more done. But then it morphs – shockingly easily and quickly, in my experience – into a list of three or four, or seven or eight or nine, things you absolutely must do each morning, if you’re to stand any chance of being happy or productive.

And just like that, you’ve turned a system for living better into an obstacle to living better, because every time something gets in the way of the routine – whether an external interruption or the fact that you simply don’t feel like meditating or journaling this morning – you’ll find yourself feeling at a major disadvantage, and/or mired in self-criticism, with no option but to promise yourself you’ll start afresh tomorrow, and do things perfectly from then on.

A more wide-reaching form of toxic precondition is what Anne-Laure Le Cunff, in her brilliant just-published book Tiny Experiments, calls “the tyranny of purpose” – the oppressive idea that the activities with which we fill our days must be leading up to something, to some final and finished state of having arrived at our destination in life, if they’re to be worth doing in the first place. Her book is a practical guide to living experimentally and with curiosity in the deepest sense of those terms – ie., not just as a cleverer way of putting your five-year vision into action, but because living experimentally and with curiosity is an inherently fulfilling way to live. Imagine the projects you could launch, the hobbies you could explore, the ways you could conduct your social life or parenting, and much else besides, if you needed no reassurance that the new way of doing things was every going to become a permanent feature of your life! Wouldn’t you suddenly feel much, much freer to act?

Which brings us, I think, to the fundamental toxic precondition lurking behind every other toxic precondition: the strong desire we have for some kind of guarantee – before we embark on a new activity, or even just allow ourselves to relax into life – that it’ll all unfold safely and securely, that we’ll retain the feeling of being in control. That’s what you’re surrendering, in a small way, when you go ahead and write a few hundred words of your novel, with no certainty they’ll be any good. Or when you move forward with the day’s projects despite not having carried out your morning routine to the letter. It’s also what you’re surrendering when you decide to cut yourself a bit more slack in life – because who knows what chaos might unfold if you stopped yelling internally at yourself to work harder or do better, if you stopped watching yourself like a hawk for signs of backsliding? In other words: we don’t erect toxic preconditions simply because we’re irrational, self-defeating idiots. We do it because we want to feel secure, and to avoid the risk of experiencing emotions we’re unsure we’d be able to handle.

This explains why it can be so powerfully liberating – and action-triggering – to understand that the uncertainty and insecurity you imagine you’re avoiding is in fact how things already are for you. As the great Elizabeth Gilbert puts it: “You are afraid of surrender because you don’t want to lose control. But you never had control; all you had was anxiety.” Getting past toxic preconditions is less a matter of being willing to step into the unknown than of realising that you’re already in the unknown. And that since the rest of your life will doubtless contain a mix of pains and pleasures anyway – in proportions you’re completely unable to predict – you’ve got less to lose by just doing the things you’ve been contemplating doing, or showing up for life in the manner that feels most sane, relaxed, and energising to you.

Horton offers some good tips for writers, including Clive Thompson’s splendidly eccentric approach of deliberately messing up his first drafts, with “//” symbols and hyphens all over the place, so as to enhance the sense of their being provisional. Beyond writing, I’ve also found it useful to employ my own form of tiny experiment, which works like this: if there’s some activity or way of being you feel reluctant to try, put a prominent marker in your calendar two weeks from now, or set a phone reminder, and tell yourself you’ll be free to revert to your old ways once that date rolls around. This serves as a psychological safety net – so now you can jump. And you no longer need so much confidence that you’re choosing the right path, because after all, even if it’s true that you’re a terrible procrastinator, or deluded about your creative talents, or a bad parent, or whatever else it is that you tend to berate yourself about, well… what difference is two more weeks of missteps really going to make?

You never had control; all you had was anxiety. And when you let go of that, even a little bit, what you’re left with is one of the most powerful reasons imaginable for taking any action that feels as though it might make life more meaningful or vibrant, which is that frankly, at the end of the day, you might as well.

 

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