Personal Engagement

To Continue or To Stop

My endeavour is always demanding, however gratifying it may be. So the endless entropy of everyday life renders victories transient. There is no such thing as permanent success. There may be an ending and a turning elsewhere. But then how to decide that it is the end?

Before looking at stopping, let's look at what keeps me going with my endeavour. There is only one possibility: it must be something within me. No outside agency could possibly get me to do to myself what the endeavour does. Haven't you ever felt like that as a parent, or partner, or student, or investigator, or entrepreneur or whatever your biggest current personal endeavour is?

I am Not Enough

But my inner sense of myself: my experience-RL4 is surely insufficient. It must be bolstered and the one bolster that is there for me whatever happens and whatever others say or do is the spiritual essence of RL7: Willingness. Whether manifested as hope, as patience, as trust, as love or as faith, willingness provides the essential inner support for me and for the endeavour that depends so much on me because it is mine.

This willingness need not be only mine: it may be provided in part for me by others who value my endeavour for their own reasons. I still experience it as support.

It is a mutual interaction: my experience-RL4, with all its inputs will provide me with experiences that either support willingness or erode it. 

Click to see.

Why «My Experience-RL4_B» might leads me to move on:

• The original goal-RL6_A may no longer suit me so well and energy drops.
• Group norms-RL6_C may have subtly changed and that destabilizes me.
• The formal specifications-RL5_C may have remoulded my way of thinking and reduced my interest.
• Travails of adaptation-RL3_C may have focused my attention on just how powerful are the forces arrayed against my efforts.
• The desired development-RL3 has structured my values in such a way that I feel alienated from the original impetus.
• My inquiries-RL2 may inform me that the expectations I had were unrealistic or that the costs were disproportionate.
• When the colour of my informal accounts-RL5_A starts turning to grey, it is certainly time to think of bringing down the curtain.

We now know why my endeavour continues: it is because of my deep personal engagement with it. An engagement which is driven by many factors, especially:

• forces in my external reality;
• support of others around me ;
• my readiness to face up to changes; &
• my inner strength.

We also know why an endeavour ceases to be my endeavour. My willingness drops, my experience is altered, and support for the endeavour withers.

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• Now it is time to review
  and then
• Explore where this framework takes us.

Originally posted : 13-Aug-2011