Making an Effort

Making an Effort

I recently taught a workshop in Poznan, Poland, and a group of people from a city five hours away heard I would be teaching there. They asked if I would have an evening free to meet with them. I agreed, and they drove all day to come and work on dreams together that evening. While working together I learned that as soon as we finished one of the participants would take an all-night bus back home, arriving just in time to take his son to school and go to work. Interestingly, his was one of the dreams chosen to work with (using our intuition exercise). And, equally interesting, his dream was about a big change he was to make in his waking life. I told him he would do it. That anyone who makes such an effort to ask a question about their life, and search with equal effort to answer it, will be rewarded.

In our increasingly easy modern world making an effort is often disregarded, looked over. We order take-out instead of making dinner, Google map instead of exploring, and send text messages instead of looking someone in the eye and sharing a special moment. We end up arm-chair coaching our lives instead of really getting into the game.

Vedic astrologer James Kelleher says that the energy of making an effort is found as a deity in Vedic astrology. In all the great spiritual traditions making an effort is the prerequisite for spiritual awakening, enlightenment, and change. People pilgrimage, walk for years in the desert, fast and forego physical comfort, all in search of something deeply meaningful. These traditions understand that EFFORT is the key to moving something within, and that effort, itself, is to be valued.

In our ever-distracted world, where an order of toilet paper is just a 2-hour Amazon delivery away, effort seems like a foreign concept. We’ve come a long way from thinking of it as a deity, much less as something worthwhile. Too bad, because it’s a game-changer. Because at some big moment in our life we arrive (if we make the effort to self-reflect) at seeing where we are now, and having a vision of where we want to be. Between these two things – now and what’s possible – there is a very small, little gap. And the only way to cross that gap is through making an effort.

I just saw the movie Greenberg, with Ben Stiller. His character comes back to LA after 20 years and confronts the fact that all the people he knew have gone on and made careers and lives for themselves while he’s done nothing. “I’m working really hard at doing nothing right now” his character tells everyone. Like a modern Rip Van Winkle, Greenberg wakes up to the fact that life passed him by, that all that doing nothing only meant obsessing over the past. He finally asks someone what people say about him. “That you don’t make an effort. That you never made an effort.”

We tend to think relationships will fix themselves, that job opportunities will appear out of the blue, that starting that business we’ve always wanted to do will magically appear as an offer waved in the air by some rich benefactor who just appeared on our doorstep. We sit and hover and wait, hoping that time will make change on our behalves, that a right moment will arrive on its own.

It doesn’t.

Oh sure, time goes by, opportunities come and go, and circumstances change, but, like Greenberg, if we stay asleep to all of it, it’s everything and everyone else that will change while we remain stuck in place, sitting in that no-choice space of not making an effort.

Effort … it’s the difference between waiting for a good feeling to suddenly return to a stale couple or making a moment to be present and listen to the other, making a space for something new to occur. It’s the difference between waiting for a right time to leave our job before we start a new venture and making the new venture that causes us to have to leave our job. Like the Knights who made the effort to plunge into dark, unknown forests and fight monsters in the search for the Holy Grail, we can arrive at the treasure we seek. We just have to make an effort to get there.

What is waiting for you to put effort into? What dream is lying dormant as seed waiting for you to water it? Try putting a bit of effort behind it, and see what happens…