If you’ve endeavored to sit down and figure out your New Year’s adventure, resolution, consecration, theme, grand scheme, take-over-the-world-and-take-no-prisoners plan, and you find – “Squirrel!” – yourself – “Oh, look, a new email.” – distracted – “hahahahaha, I love that video!” – perhaps you might – “this is stupid” – be facing – “I don’t need no stinking resolution” – a little resistance.

Well, entrepreneur and author Seth Godin has a little advice about your Chance of a Lifetime:

“A friend asked me the other day, “…given the sorry state of so much in the world, what’s possible to look forward to?

“The state isn’t sorry. It’s wide open….The thing is, we still live in a world that’s filled with opportunity. In fact, we have more than an opportunity — we have an obligation. An obligation to spend our time doing great things. To find ideas that matter and to share them. To push ourselves and the people around us to demonstrate gratitude, insight, and inspiration. To take risks and to make the world better by being amazing.”

So, as you fidget, as you procrastinate, as you roll your eyes and fiddle with some gadget, consider these bad cop/good cop quotes.

“Aversion is a form of bondage. We are tied to what we hate or fear. That is why, in our lives, the same problem, the same danger or difficulty, will present itself over and over again in various prospects, as long as we continue to resist or run away from it instead of examining it and solving it.”
– Patanjali, c. 200-150 BCE

Perhaps, even in 200 BCE, you were encouraged to lean into your fear, your resistance?

Many of my quotes come from Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing. I love it when some of the oldest quotes resonate. Ooh – even way back when, we struggled with ourselves. Nothing we’re facing is truly new.

Remember that part of setting yourself up with for a grand adventure, establishing a resolution, a goal, or consecration, means asking questions of yourself. That can be frustrating if you don’t know the answers. Frustration is hazardous. And that you don’t know the answers is entirely the point.

“Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
– Rainer Maria Rilke, 1875-1926

Examine your resistance. Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart.