Could you climb a thousand steps? Probably not.
But could you climb one step a thousand times?
Sounds a lot more doable, doesn’t it?
It’s all in how you assess the task in your mind. If you imagine climbing a thousand steps, it’s as if you are picking up all thousand steps at the same time and saying “Nope, no way I can do this task, it’s way too heavy, ”
But if you imagine doing one step a thousand times, you are only picking up a single step, and saying, “This is so light! Yeah, I might be able to do this 1K times. ”
Yet the task has not changed in the slightest. Only your conception of it has. Yet now the task seems much, much easier.
And the new “one at a time” perception is actually the more accurate one, because you will only ever have to climb one step at a time.
At no point is it physically or logically possible to climb a thousand steps at the same time. So assessing the task that way makes absolutely no sense.
So why do we do it? Why do some of us do it all the time? What gives?
We do it because we don’t want to do the task.
But for whatever reason – usually pride – we don’t want to admit to ourselves that we just plain don’t want to do it and that on some deep layer of our minds it feels like we are avoiding work or travail and that can be a very addictive feeling.
So it is a very efficient form of self-defeat. If it was possible, you’d have to try. And you don’t want to try. So it’s not possible. QED.
Why so cunningly defeat yourself? Because you’re afraid. Afraid of the world. Afraid of growing up. Afraid that you will not be able to handle real actual; grown-up life. That it’s far too big a task for little old you to handle and you’d be crushed.
After all, who could possibly lift all of adult life at once?
That sounds vaguely familiar from somewhere.
And even worse, once you start succeeding at things, people will expect you to do it again and again and again on and on into infinity, and nobody can lift infinity, so it must be completely impossible to have an adult life.
Despite the fact that literally billions of human beings are doing it as we speak. You could not possibly need more proof that all this “impossible” stuff is pure bullshit and it is, in fact, perfectly possible to do, and in fact, even probable
But you don’t want to. You’re scared, and you don’t want to go. You want to stay. You would rather stay the eternal infant, no matter the cost, than have to face and overcome your enormous fear of growing up.
You are even willing to endure the enormous pain caused by blocked growth rather than have to grow up. You are a plant in far too small a pot and so you are rootbound and wretched and suffering all the time.
Still, it’s better than having to grow up, right?
After all, if you grow up, something bad might happen to you.
You might even get hurt.
More after the break.
About adult relationships
What does it mean when a child gets along better with adults than with kids his age?
Because that’s what it was like for me when I was a preteen. Kids my age were mostly just a source of bullying. Even with the nicer ones, I just didn’t click. I wanted to be friends with them but I just didn’t know how to connect.
Thanks, lack of kindergarten!
But that wasn’t the only problem. No point in trying to ignore the elephant in the room : I was just way, way smarter than them,
I arrived at Grade 1 already able to read (well) and write (badly). I knew math up to but not including long division. I could speak with adults on their level. I could sing (okay).
But more than any of that, I was just on a totally different plane than most people.
I still am, to be honest, but I am much better at coming down to be with people.
This made me alien to my classmates. They might not have been on my level but they could sense my otherworldly strangeness and how far above them I was intellectually and that made me “weird”.
Basically, in that clip, little Simba is a normal kid and Scar is me.
Ya know, without the evil.
But you can see how some excitable people read something LGBTIA into it.
Where was I? I thread-jacked myself with the Lion King.
Oh right. I was being a weird kid.
The bitingly cruel irony is that my elevated IQ let me see my fellow children as what they were : children.
Children who thought and behaved childishly. Whereas I was “mature” and “sensible” and eerily self-possessed.
That was part of what adults found fascinating about me. Compared to most kids my age I might as well have been a talking dog. Hearing perfectly adult speech coming out of a little boy must have been quite bizarre.
Plus precocious kids have an appeal of their own. That’s why they show up as characters in sitcoms so much. In our deep social programming, a smart child is a “good” child in that we want our kids’ minds to grow and therefore a smart kid is a kid who is thriving, and that pleases us.
And I was a precocious little freckle faced redhead back then.
It’s like I walked straight out of Central Casting.
“We need a generic Youngest Child, Have you got one?”
“Yup. Got one right here. He’s even a lovable little smartass after you get him calmed down and relaxed. ”
“Yeah yeah. I bet he’s even a freckle faced redhead, right?”
“You know it. I’ll send him right over. ”
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.