Anyone who's ever attempted anything of real value or meaning knows one thing: Resistance is inevitable!
No, I'm not quoting the movie 300. This is just a fact of life.
And unlike 300, where 300 soldiers fended off swarms of Greek legions who wished to take possession of their city, the resistance we face is, well, a bit more banal than
that.
How about sitting down to write your email for the day, and then the urge to check your own email inbox suddenly comes over you. That is resistance that we all face in one form or another.
The bad kind of resistance, as I'll get to in a moment.
So while resistance is inevitable, it can either keep us focused on our Ikigai or it can possibly be the universe telling us we're not following the path we're meant to
be on.
Sometimes what our passions want prevents us from even discovering our Ikigai let alone following it.
Conversely, resistance is sometimes a sign that we're indeed on the right path, and that we need to press forward until the job is done.
When my wife Sana and I were in the beginning stages of applying for her visa to enter the United States, we encountered tremendous
resistance in the form of the National Visa Center seemingly unable to read simple forms scanned into their own system.
Over and over, we would upload the documents, wait the customary 12 weeks or so for a reply, and the reply would ask for more documents. Sometimes they'd ask for documents they already had, or were looking in the wrong places for the info they needed.
It was indeed quite frustrating. But the day came when
we finally got the news we were waiting for. She was scheduled for the interview; then the visa was finally issued.
Somehow those parts dealing with the NVC don't make it into the final cut of 90 Day Fiance. And I remember thinking all this would be enough to split up a couple who wasn't truly committed to their relationship, be it an engagement or a marriage.
But Sana and I came through it still committed to one another and to
the marriage. For all we know those trials we experienced were necessary to enable us to endure real trials.
All that to say there's good resistance and bad resistance.
Bad resistance knocks you off the path you're meant to be on; or prevents you from ever discovering the path in the first place.
Good resistance forces you to ask yourself, Is this really worth it? And when it's aligned with your Ikigai,
then it is indeed worth the trouble.
Your Ikigai is like the everlasting flame at JFK's grave; it never goes out.
Even when you allow bad resistance to take you away from it, it's always calling you back.
And when you get back to pursuing your Ikigai, you can count on Resistance coming at you like those hordes of soldiers in 300.
Embrace it; take pleasure
in it. Those hard times and setbacks only give you things to talk about at your victory dinner when you ultimately succeed.
**I'll be sharing more about Ikigai in future emails, and then recording them all into one podcast on the Energeia.LIVE podcast feed. If you want to listen to the few episodes on the feed I've published thus far, you can listen at this link: https://energeia.live
And if you happened to miss previous emails in this series, you can read them here: https://energeia.live/category/ikigai/