Showing up is grit. It’s the act of patience and persistence. It demands discipline day in and day out with no time out. And it has a memory.
We show up for our hobbies, for our passions, for our professional ambitions, for our relationships and friendships, for our causes and our community. We show up to the things that we find ourselves drawn to, and that which we believe is our place to find. We show up to the presence of God in our midst, and to the understanding of who we are.
Showing up means caring. It’s a commitment that you can’t let go of, even if it comes at the expense of comfort or conformity. It’s caring for the path as much as for the outcome. When you show up, over a sufficiently optimal period of time, you set yourself up for compounding – a powerful beast that packs a punch, despite its simplicity.
At maturity, ‘showing up’ transcends its name and becomes a willful but conscious presence in the things that occupy the river of time. But the path to maturity isn’t a straight road. It passes through Joseph Campbell’s hero journey of peaks and troughs. The valleys in the path subjugate our senses and coerce us to stay just a little bit longer. The path abhors complacency and comfort. It encapsulates the wanton act of destruction and new beginnings. But the act itself generates the eddies of change. Showing up becomes deliberate practice and in so doing, transcends from a game to elder game.
Writers show up even when they have nothing to say. Painters show up even when colors or forms evade them. Professionals show up when the conversations get tough. And human beings show up for each other. Showing up is not for the faint hearted and is 50% of all the battles we fight.
It’s important to remember that planning to show up isn’t the same as showing up. So often we mistake one for the other and stay consistently ignorant of the fact that they are not the same. The entire personal productivity craze can be described as planning for showing up when showing up requires nothing other than a genuine need and desire to do so.
We can create our own desires, manufacture our own needs. But they need to be ours, authentically ours. Borrowed desires and needs does not pass muster as they are not systemically inclined. Our human body is a system, our brain is a system – systems interact with other systems more sustainably than they do with one-off triggers or stimulations. To engage a system, one must learn to deal with complex adaptive ones. Especially those that have taken millenniums to form and evolve. To counter Lindy effect, one must leverage Lindy effect itself. To motivate oneself to show up, one must go back to that which has stood the test of times, even as the world has changed around them.
Showing up involves both perseverance and motivation. They can be cultivated but never manufactured. Persevrance and grit form the bulwark against boredom and fear of failure. Motivation absorbs the distractions and myriad other probes our sensory glands can interject in our path. Perseverance calls out a discipline that can be difficult to sustain. It requires a system that can recycle itself out of failures and continue apace with our ambitions. Motivation is brought forth by Clear’s Atomic Habits with stackable containers of mini routines that can trigger motivations in an automated, self-regulated manner without the need to intervene. Our mortal conscience can only play catchup in most of these cases.
Showing up requires more than personal control. It requires an ecosystem to thrive – the ecology of participation from those that it impacts and intersects, the complexity of the systems it aims to traverse, the friction of the habits it aims to conquer. You cannot dabble in it; you may only immerse yourself into the pursuit.
But more than that, you need to clearly understand the pursuit itself. Clarity comes in increments as you continue to show up. And with clarity arrives the realization of simplicity of it all. The simplicity of elimination, of prioritization, and of clear, unequivocal sponsorship of this idea – this core idea of your path and its fused nature with your purpose. Showing up bolsters the idea of willful creation of meaning, of confronting the absurdity and randomness head-on, and of instituting agency with everything you do with your life. It pre-supposes a large dependency on the determinate nature of existence, of willpower and our ability to create a life of our own choosing. The act of showing up is predicated on the idea that we humans can determine our own fate, that we are but forms of carbon with no afterlife to speak of other than being one with the atomic world around us. Showing up isn’t the same as being, as in the being in human-being. The latter is passive, enforces acceptance, and a gentle existence. The former is active, defines actions, and prefaces an aggressive stance at the randomness in life.
I wonder sometimes what makes some stick to their path longer than would seem feasible. Is it something they can see far into the viewing glass, or is it a personality trait to refuse to give up? Is it the specific context and the lottery (birth, time, prosperity, community) that they find themselves endowed with or that has nothing to do with their discipline? What drives this almost maniacal quest for continuing to tread down the path they have chosen for themselves, regardless of the outcome or the results? I bet it’s never the outcome themselves that motivate these outliers amongst us, the originals amongst our herd, the eccentrics within our midst. Something tells me its an intrinsic desire to find meaning, an instilled passion for never giving up, a curated lens for long-term thinking, a keen grasp of infinite game thinking, and blinkers for never letting distractions come in the way.
Sources:
Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse
Jargogled Impressions. 
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