Unsettled

The other day my yoga instructor asked us to “demand more.” At first I found the request inspiring. Then I thought it ironic that we should demand more from a discipline that is as much about surrender as it is about confrontation. Days later, those words and that thought were still with me. It seems we go about our quest for inner peace with as much aggression as a Wall Street trader.

Maybe it’s our nature to always demand more. If so, it’s both a blessing and a curse. Without this desire to always improve we never would have evolved. And perhaps it’s our current evolutionary cycle that is at the root of our anxiety now. We are straddling the line between the information age and the existential age — we are proud of the information we have acquired yet at the same time we question what it all means. Like a child just learning to talk, we are excited at our potential and frustrated by the lack of mastery over it. We demand so much to happen quickly and at the same time move forward slowly. It’s no wonder we are unsettled.

To get to the peak, Nietzche said, you have to climb without thought. Years ago a friend of mine at the top of her game put her career on hold for a three-month trip to India. She knew that things would change while she was gone in terms of her business — clients would have moved on, someone else would become the darling of her firm. However, when she did return, everythng seemed to be the same … externally. It was she who changed internally. She began to practice all that she had learned on her life-changing trip — to live, love, and work more mindfully. That was when things really did change externally. The elements of her life shifted gently to accommodate the change she had created within herself until her inner world matched her outer world.

Perhaps it is our fate to never feel completely settled. Blame it on our nomadic beginnings, our conquering natures, our constant search for something bigger, better. Whatever our destiny holds it seems a foregone conclusion that we will always demand more. And while this may be dificult to live with, it is the part of our nature we will live by.