Stop Overthinking and Show Up Instead

Just walk through the open doors.

I think about white women who do yoga a lot. I don’t mean this in a fetish sense: I mean this very quizzically.

This isn’t a think-piece about the cultural blindness that comes when an ancient Eastern spiritual art gets recontextualized and reappropriated as a fashionable fitness craze. No, that’s been done before, and it’s been done better. But I would like to discuss what people get out of it.

This isn’t breaking news. Apparently, other people have asked these same questions. From two separate academic surveys in 2013 and 2014:

More than 90 percent of people come to yoga for flexibility, stress relief, health, and physical fitness. But, for most people, their primary reason for doing yoga will change. Two-thirds of yoga students and 85 percent of yoga teachers have a change of heart regarding why they do yoga — most often changing to spirituality or self-actualization, a sense of fulfilling their potential. Yoga offers self-reflection, the practice of kindness and self-compassion, and continued growth and self-awareness.

It’s interesting to see this laid out in so few words, in a Western context, and juxtapose the practice of yoga with its roots. The modern mystics appear to be finding the same sort of peace, flexibility, enlightenment, purity, and spiritual growth as was intended — in spite of largely whitewashing and westernizing the practice from its origins.

I am going to use this — sure, why not? — as a framework to talk about how people can get more out of life, despite a bunch of other people — ahem, people like me — looking at them and wondering why we think they’re doing it all wrong. In the meantime, I’m going to unearth some embarrassing nuggets from my past.

I Was A Poser Who Did I Was Told

I remember the day I hit the eject button on the first iteration of my life: April 1, 2001.

See, up until that day, I questioned nothing. I knew who I was. I knew what I wanted. I believed in the Catholic father, son, and holy spirit. I adhered to the Ten Commandments. I knew I would attend Syracuse University. I wanted to be a sportscaster. I had the idyllic high school sweetheart girlfriend who I would marry after college. I woke up most mornings and ran, lifted weights in the afternoon, studied in the evening, and snuck shots of Cuervo in at night. I pledged a fraternity. I bought Abercrombie shirts. I had a puka-shell necklace, an Anna Kournikova poster, and frosted tips. I listened to both Creed and Dave Matthews Band. Ah, the perils of being an elder millennial in the Northeast United States.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was a total (to borrow one of my favorite words I usually reserve for other people) douchecanoe — I was doing what I thought I should be doing, and I was doing it pretty well for a while.

But like everyone who runs too fast down the wrong track, I started noticing cracks in my psyche early in 2001. I started openly questioning my faith in God, my career path, my relationships, right from wrong, sex vs love, sobriety vs edginess, conservative vs liberal, and whether or not Nickelback was really the next great legendary rock band. [Author’s Note: They were not.]

In addition, I started getting very anxious. I stopped going to class, I started smoking weed, I asked myself questions to the point of paralysis, and I started pushing my limits around what I could “get away with.”

On April 1, 2001, I decided to leave the path I was on — my career, my school, my girlfriend, my morals, my religion, Nickelback — and, as is customary among single white men who never really mature past adolescence, and have watched their former friends and classmates settle down and make families, I became a wandering bullshit artist of “enlightenment” and “alternative thinking.” (Also, I got way too drunk, too often.)

Ever since that day, I incessantly asked myself, almost all the time, “Why are you like this?” Until the questioning itself became the answer. In times when I get all wrapped up in my head, the questioning becomes the answer. That’s a problem. I suppose it’s an identity crisis.

Is This All That There Is?

I’m one of those people who openly wonder, “What else is there?” Or, “Is this all that there is?” Like … all the fucking time. It’s almost my entire Medium output.

I know from talking to you in the past half-decade that a lot of you probably do, too. (You don’t accumulate tens of thousands of dedicated readers by confessing to things no one else relates to, although the very act of bragging about this is probably unrelatable and definitively offputting. Le sigh — y’all can chew the meat and spit out the bones.)

The answers to questions of “what else” and “what next”, ultimately, are as varied as the people who ask them. People are unique and complex, but questions are pretty universal even if most folks have simple answers.

I have everything I want on paper. I’m generally happy, too, with my own lot. Still, I can’t seem to silence the inner voice asking “Is this all that there is?”

To get to the heart of that, I’ve spent lots of time looking inward, becoming more insular, more quizzical, and more introspective. I didn’t write, I didn’t really do anything, I just … thought.

Incredibly, I found no answers — only the additional anxiety that stems from thinking: “If I can’t be satisfied now, with what feels like everything, then I suppose I’d be doomed to live a life spent aimlessly wandering from place to place, person to person, thing to thing, looking for the “else,” or the “all.”

If I could offer any advice — and, this is hard-earned more from pushing myself to the limits of my sanity and health than from runaway success — it is this: Just keep showing up. Don’t drop off the face of the Earth looking for the “what else,” because you likely won’t find it. Not all who wander are lost, but there’s definitely plenty of lost people who’ve been too scared to wander.

Don’t Overthink This

The people who are happy and fulfilled and full of life seem to just go where they’re invited. They look outward. They see needs and fill them. They see people and laugh with them. They see problems and solve them, and if they can’t solve them they just listen. They show up. And they do it every damn day, only briefly considering their options, but knowing that not showing up isn’t going to be one of them.

When I’ve had long stretches of happiness and success — and they’re not terribly often and most of them are fairly recent, like in my 30s recent — I had them because I just kept going. I may not have been certain, but I at least had a role to play and could identify with it. I had a solid idea of what I’d be doing in the next month or year, even if I hadn’t necessarily set any goals. I was deep in a flow state: the level of challenge matched my level of aptitude matched my level of enjoyment. It felt right and so I sorta assumed it was. So I soldiered onward until it didn’t feel right anymore.

This might sound too simple. This may even sound like it’s the path of least resistance, but if you’ve ever heard anyone say “In the time it took you to look for the remote control you could’ve gotten up and changed the channel” you know that’s not always true. I’ve been looking for the remote control for what’s felt like months, if not years. Getting forced indoors and then allowed back outdoors with no idea where to go will do that to you.

If you stay in the same room, the same doors will open. If you walk through those doors into new rooms, new doors will open. This is how you get someplace. By walking through the doors that are open to you, and scanning the room for other interesting open doors, instead of relentlessly searching for keys for the ones that are locked.

Start by showing up: It’s the only way you’ll go places. Don’t let the lack of an itinerary scare you into staying home. Sure, you may not do what you expect, get what you came for, or catch your big break, but you’ll get a lot more out of life. You can still question things, but if you begin skipping out on life to question it, you have already begun to die.

So, yes — sometimes, even the basic, whitewashed version of yoga is enough to get the full benefits of the real, deeper thing … as much as it makes me gnash my teeth to think about this phenomenon. Sometimes you just gotta do what feels right to you, and as long as you’re not actively harming yourself or others that’s probably good enough for now.

The answer to, “Is this all that there is?” is likely a simple yes. This is it. Only the specific contents of this are up to you. You can make the best of it, make more of it, or go inward and search for something that can’t be found, something that likely exists just outside of the realm of your reach, somewhere in the darkness of your own incessant questioning, somewhere you probably don’t want to be. (I hear Nickelback has a residency there.)

We all have a likely once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to start over. To reconfigure who we are, what we mean, what holds meaning for us, and who we want to become. It’s a lonely journey, but only at first, and only so long as you don’t interpret that loneliness as evidence that you’re on the wrong path. I assure you: the more you show up, and the more rooms you walk into, the more people you’ll meet. And they’ll be willing to open even more doors for you if you’re willing to walk through them.

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