Do You Want To Be A Badass? Me Too
/
Badassity. Noun. The state of being a total badass. The level to which a life demonstrates the qualities of competency, determination, and willingness to engage in hard fucking work.
And if a person wants to pass their time on this planet in a happy and useful way, badassity is also a good metric to track because of this fundamental truth: trying harder in basically any area of life results in vast increases in existential satisfaction with being who you are.
It's not something that our modern culture is so concerned with, at least not on a conscious level, though we are inspired by examples of extreme badassity such as Beyonce and Elizabeth Warren and Malala Yousafzai. But the bulk of our culture seems to think that being awesome means having Ls and Vs on your purse, when in fact it means something much simpler than that. It means paying attention and not giving up.
And the effect of focusing on developing badassity is kind of remarkable, because it's kind of a meta-goal that turbo-boosts all your other goals. Without it, I can fall into a somnambulant state where things happen to me and I bounce around vaguely. And it kind of feels shitty, like wandering through a swamp with no destination in mind.
When I keep it at the front of my mind, though (working hard makes you stronger, you can learn this, keep going) I get a lot of fun stuff done! And moreover it feels amazing. How else could it feel to push yourself in the pursuit of something you truly care about? Or to achieve something you never could do before? It's the difference between stumbling into bed after a day on the couch, and falling into bed after a day of honest hard labor.
You could use a lot of words to express this feeling -- pride, accomplishment, wisdom. But I like badass because it has a bad word in it and it implies a sense of experience as well as a willingness to always go further, all wrapped up in some hilarious Dirty Harry-ish connotations. And it somehow gets to the heart of what it means to live a satisfying and meaningful life: it's about working hard and learning from your work, over and over again. Eventually, inexorably, if you do this, you will know many things, and you will be a badass.
Some people have had the habit of badassity ingrained in them from a young age. Maybe their parents were badass, and so they learned to be, too, or maybe they were just naturally born that way. I am not one of these people, though I did have a super badass grandfather, and he made quite a lot of fun of me as a child because of my lazy bones. "Heighth of ambition!" he'd bellow on his way to work outside, as I lounged in front of the Great Space Coaster.
He tried to teach me that doing stuff is more fun than watching TV. He'd make me go for bike rides on nice days and he'd take me to his ginormous garden and show me how to pick strawberries and at the end of the day we'd go to the A&W drive in for big, frosty root beers which was awesome.
When we went home from Grandma and Grandpa's though, we'd slip back into our patterns of watching TV and reading books and going to movies instead of baking pies and building with blocks and watching ants outside. That pattern has kind of continued into adulthood as well -- I'll work really hard at developing myself for a while, then slide back for a while. And that's fine and probably even normal ... but what I want to work on now is making badassity the ethos by which I live my life rather than just something I'm doing until the next time I get stressed out.
Now, to get from doldrummy inertia back into badass momentum, there is a short but steep hill to get over, and after that things start rolling. In The War of Art, they call the hill Resistance. In chemistry, they call it activation energy. In life, it's just the amount of effort it takes to flip the switch between being at rest and being in motion.
The funny thing about this little hill is that it looks ENORMOUS from a static position. Once you get started, though, you realize it's totally doable and isn't it a nice fresh-smelling day today anyway? Zippity do dah, let's do this!
Sometimes you can get stuck in the loop of overcoming Resistance, then giving into it, then overcoming it again, then giving back into it, forever ... and you end up expending a lot of effort without building up much momentum. Instead of keeping the energy going, you let it dissipate, thinking it will be so easy to just get it back again. You tread the same ground over and over. It's slightly ridiculous, yes, and also exhausting and disheartening, and all too common.
I say "you," but I mean me. I have gone through that loop so many times that I could probably cry about it if I were pre-menstrual! But, meh, fuck it, I don't feel like crying ... I feel like getting better.
What about you? Are you feeling badass about anything these days? Or feeling stuck on something? Do you have some inertia and/or momentum going? What's shakin'?
