We Choose to Go to the Moon

All this contemplation of tapas—it’s been a more focused month than usual on the blog.  I think because despite the fact that I am actually a very hard-working person, I am constantly feeling like I don’t have tapas.  I feel I am often avoiding hard work. 

This evening right in the middle of teaching my class, I suddenly thought of JFK’s “We Choose to Go to the Moon” speech.  I participated in a training once where we had to memorize a piece of a speech and try to deliver it as much like the original as possible, to really embody it.  Even though this speech wasn’t the one I was assigned, it has really stuck with me.  “We choose to go to the moon.  We choose to go to the moon.  We choose to go to the moon . . . not because it is easy but because it is hard.”  (Click here for a link to this part of the speech).

I was thinking yesterday about how effort doesn’t have to be effortful.  Another one of these paradoxical truths.  It seems like there is something in us as humans that loves a challenge.  And that when I am in the place of enjoying the hard work, it isn’t “hard work.”  It’s sort of like when I wrote a few months ago about accepting resistance and then it isn’t there anymore.

Which sort of goes with the other thing I have been thinking about.  I led this retreat on being in the flow of life and have used a river metaphor quite a few times lately.  The idea is that there is a way to be neither fighting against the current nor passively being thrown against the rocks, but to be actively swimming in the direction that things are going, interacting with the current to play a part, but “going with the flow.”  But the more I think about it, the more I think you can’t actually not go with the flow of life.  That’s the whole trick—you can’t step outside of the flow and you can’t go against it.  Whatever you are doing, you are ultimately going with the flow of life.  Which I guess brings us back to tapas.  Some students have asked about tapas and effort vs. resistance and trying to control.  If the effort feels effortful, then it’s probably resistance and trying to control.  When I am going with life, then the tapas feels more like enthusiastic participation than a struggle.

We choose to go to the moon not because it is easy but because it is hard, not because we have to but because we want to, because it is fun and exciting to meet the challenges that life gives us.