One is reminded of Juggernaut from X-Men 3: The Last Stand.
For a fan of the X-Men comics, the movie version of JG was too small, but that’s beside the point.
Juggernaut is an unstoppable force. And if time is real, and if time is like Juggernaut — unstoppable, inexorable in its passage, then perhaps we can hitch a ride on it by — no, wait, that just makes time seem scary.
No, um…I dunno. Whatever.
Anyway!
We can be like Juggernaut (what would Juggernaut do?). We become like Juggernaut when we do one active thing at a time. Many passive things — background immersion counts and works — but only ever one active thing. When we calm down, we become powerful. About which a fark can be given, only one thing (or less) at a time can there be.
You’ve never seen someone screaming and shouting and thought: “what a powerful guy!”, have you? Losing your head doesn’t make you powerful, it doesn’t make you concerned, it doesn’t make you loving and sincere, it just makes you, well, lost. Incoherent. Energy dispersed and full of crap, like an overflowing toilet. Lacking in the laser-like focus of a magnifying glass, lacking in the narrow, purposeful direction of water in a properly flushing toilet.
A lot of toilet talk today.
Now, take a look at yourself. Do you wanna be powerful? Then calm down. Read Eckhart Tolle if you must. No, really. His Practicing the Power of Now is one of the most, well, practical books on concentration ever written, and it came right out of the fruity, New Age fringe you so love to hate 😉 . It would be bigoted to ignore the things he’s right about just because you disagree with the things he’s wrong about…like not hanging out with a kid because he’s Greek Orthodox and you’re Catholic (the correct answer, by the way, is Mormonism). If you’re old enough to read this, you’re old enough to pick the bones out of your own books; you shouldn’t need everything dumbed down and turned into inoffensive, easy-to-chew, easy-to-swallow fillet just so you can “safely” consume it; that’s for babies. 1
Relax.
One.
One.
One.
One new word a time.
I’m not saying this because I’m wise or smart or deep. I am none of those things. But this works. Calming down works. That’s why I’m sharing this with you.
Of course you can be calm when there’s nothing to worry about, no readily available ingredients for your worry casserole, but that’s like saying: “this building always has running water except when there’s a fire”, or “this room has electric lights running at all times except when it’s dark outside). It is precisely because everyone else is afraid and in a panic, it is precisely because there are things for you to worry about that you must be clam, I mean, calm 😛 .
You must be clam!
Haha.
It is precisely because there’s a fire raging that you must be the water. It is precisely when everything is at its hottest that you must be at your coolest. Panic and pessimism are the only options you cannot afford. You don’t have time for that. Water only beats fire by being relentless and oblivious to it, not by also turning into fire. In short, by acting just like the fire doesn’t act, but being the antithesis of fire. Bruce Lee was talking about glasses and Coco-Cola at the time, but he still said it first: be like water, my friend.
Thousands of words to learn. The prospect, tall and daunting like a skyscraper in a 1970s disaster movie. And then there’s little old you. Tiny. Will you ever make it? Stupid question. Just start making it.
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Notes:
- Disclaimer: I eat all my fish boneless because…I’m both a wimp and a hypocrite. ↩
I couldn’t put up with Tolle’s strawman arguments in the vanilla Power of Now. It felt like trying to learn life lessons from a comments section.
Picking the good stuff out of low signal-to-noise content just isn’t very easy or enjoyable for me.