Inner Aspirations

I don’t believe in inner aspirations anymore. Outer aspirations, sure. If you want to build a business or get in shape, the aspiration precedes the achievement. But when it comes to the inner aspirations, the gap between desire and achievement is the degree to which you’re lying to yourself.

If you want to become more compassionate, and yet you are not, it means you don’t really want it. Perhaps you like the idea of it, but not the reality. You have to get these things out of the abstract, make them as concrete as possible.

You say you want to be compassionate, but is that your first instinct when someone flips you off on the highway? Maybe your first instinct is anger. And maybe you don’t like that. Maybe compassion for you is an escape from dealing with your anger issues. That’s why, after all this time, you haven’t become more compassionate. It remains a desire, and an insincere one at that.

When you truly want an internal change to take place, there is no gap between the desire and the change. People struggle with anxiety for years because they aren’t ready to be free of it, as much as they yearn to be. The moment they’re ready it simply falls away.

Readiness is the moment when your logic and your feelings are in perfect alignment. Any discrepancy means you will be stuck desiring rather than changing. That’s just how it works. The time you spend trying to change would be better spent figuring out if you really want to.