Committed

What are you committed to?

What are you committed to?

This week, a brilliant photographer friend told me she was scouting small and medium-sized business clients for her services and needed to put together a flyer of tier-priced package offerings, but was avoiding this task. We talked about what the offerings could look like and deadlines, and I told her I would love to help and lend any of my literary review skills if she’d like. The following day, she’d sent me a draft, thanking me for pushing her through her intimidation! How gratifying for me, and how excited and proud I was for her. She committed to a goal (to acquire new clients) and then a specific action she needed to take to position herself to meet her goal. Enlisting accountability and support toward completing this action, she is a wonderful example of committing - to a word, choice, or practice.

Currently, I am undertaking a week of media deprivation (which could also be called distraction deprivation) as part of a 12-week program called The Artist’s Way that I have committed to completing. Unless it’s music or silent films complementing another action like rest or creation (like writing this essay), I am not consuming any media. No reading (even novels), no social media, no news, no TV. The goal is to find myself facing rather than avoiding my thoughts, and creating instead of absorbing. Uncomfortable? Yes. Refreshing? Also yes. Successful? This is the first essay I’ve written for my Substack in months! Many of us recognize that we could scroll less, multitask less, buy less, binge less, but do we actually know how much more we could do in place of these distractions? We are seemingly impervious to constantly consuming more content and things than the human brain is meant to handle, and we don’t realize that this constant intake is at the expense of other possibilities.

The somewhat uncomfortable question this week has urged me to examine is what am I committed to? Further, what do I want to commit myself to, and what choices represent these commitments? In examining my habits and challenging myself with new things (like this media deprivation week) or resampling old things I stopped putting effort toward, I’ve made new or stronger commitments that create more space for what I would like in my life.

Have you examined your commitments lately? What takes most of your time and space? How would you like to arrange most of your time and space? Are you happy with your habits and their effects on you and the world? In a very uncertain time, this question encourages us to recognize and tap into our own power and integrity to build a reality that may feel just slightly more empowering than the status quo.

Recommended Reading

• The Artist’s Way
  Julia Cameron

• The 40 Rules of Love
  Elif Shafak

• The Practice
  Seth Godin

Prompts:

• What are you committed to? What choices are you continuously upholding in your life, consciously and unconsciously?

• What is a situation in your life you would like to change but haven’t? Why not? In what ways are you committed to this situation, and how could you break this committment?

• What would you like to commit to? How could you do so? If you’re not sure, what small steps could you take that would represent a committment to this choice?