The curse of not-enoughism

I got off the plane after traveling for an entire day and thought to myself,

“I should have written more today”

It’s an age-old lament. I should have studied more. I should have worked more. More, more, more. 

It brings me to a question I’ve been puzzling over pretty much my entire life:

How much should I push myself?

In a recent yoga class I took, I attempted Warrior 3, a pose that requires you to lift one leg off the ground.

I kept trying to kick my right leg up really high and losing my balance.

The instructor took one look at me flailing around and said, “No. Ground down through your other leg.”

Turns out, if you want one leg to go high, you actually can’t put all of your energy into that leg. You’ll be off balance, your form will be twisted, and your hold won’t be as strong.

Instead, you have to put your weight into the other leg, the “grounding” leg.

As soon as I did that, my pose became more stable, and my top leg was able to rise higher.

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When I think about life, “grounding down” means living well and taking care of myself* while my “other leg,” aka my ambition, reaches high.

This is a departure (and evolution) from the past me — the one that would be consumed by work to the point of mania, the one that would easily trade off wellness for achievement.

I now see that “How much should I push myself” isn’t the question to answer. Because ambition doesn’t exist in a vacuum, because energy isn’t an infinite resource that can never be depleted. Because success isn’t linearly correlated with how much you can break yourself down.

In fact, how much I can push myself is directly correlated with how much I can take care of myself — how high I can reach is directly correlated with how much I can ground down.

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*PS, this “grounding down isn’t “being lazy.” Grounding down literally takes so much energy, involving flexing your muscles in the grounding leg. It’s about creating the tension, the opposition, to maintain a stable balance.