Imagine yourself at war, on the front lines, and you’ve just heard the report that a long range missile has been launched straight at your base. The anti-air gunners run to their places while everyone else runs to theirs. You break your neck to hurry up and wait.
As you wait, you bite your nails and look around and try not to panic, but your mind is doing jumping jacks and up-downs.
You have two options.
You can stick to your training and wait, or you can go rogue and figure out a way to stop that missile yourself.
If you take the first option, then you stand firm at your post and live a lifetime in the next five minutes, defined by strength, honor, and courage—if he dies, he dies, but he’s sticking to his post.
If you take the second option, your comrades may very well spot your britches hung up on the fence as you claw your way over the barbed wire and into the woods.
The first option only works if you trust your training and your team. You know they will do their dead-level best to shoot down that missile and neutralize the threat. You are a believer.
The second option is what happens when you listen to yourself and forget your training. It’s the moment when the monkey mind takes over and fight-or-flight defines your next move. (This typically doesn’t lead to a bunch of honor or courage.)
Well, right now, a missile has been fired at our base.
Our culture is under pressure and in need of cultural and political reform.
But it’s not the first time we’ve heard a missile whistle overhead.
We get missiles fired at us on a regular basis. Every time a psychopath decides to shoot up a school or concert or church, every time our troops are called into battles, every time a hurricane comes blazing through, a missile is launched at our base.
And that is not going to change.
Our world is rated-R and there are no survivors, ultimately. It’s a game played for keeps, and recess isn’t until you get to heaven (assuming that’s where you’re headed).
If this is your perspective, the best thing you can do is weather the storm with courage and grace, keeping yourself super busy doing nothing different, following your training, hunkering down in style. You’ll believe in your work and calling, and do it well.
If that’s not your perspective, it’ll show. You’ll believe in something different. You’ll believe it’s up to you to save this thing; that it can’t be saved, or that it isn’t worth saving. Instead of hurrying up to do nothing different, you’ll run to the commander’s tent and ironically start commanding him.
Impossible as it may seem, doing nothing different is a solid plan, bringing out the very best of each of us.
Because ultimately, we aren’t in control of anything but ourselves and our small circles of influence. It’s only when we overreach that we lose touch of reality and implode mentally and emotionally.
Certainly we can’t be expected to sit still as a missile screams toward our heads, regardless of our training, but what we can do is install a transmission and make sure everything we do is reasonable, not a knee-jerk reaction, and defensible.
It’s not that serenity is the goal, that it will solve our problems by somehow diverting the threat on the eve of the bombshell, but it’s just that without inner peace, we won’t stick to our training, and if we don’t stick to our training, then the missile hitting us may very will be the thing we needed most.
“It is no use saying ‘we are doing our best.’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.” ~Winston Churchill