In Praise of Exhaustion

All of us start out lazy, born in neutral.

In school we start the car and begin accelerating.

Suddenly we’re running physically, thinking we can get more done by running. We run run run. As it says in the movie The Pursuit of Happyness, “Now we come to the part of my story called Running.” But we see that we can’t change the world as much as we’d like to, and end up feeling exhausted. We hear the grinding. We’ve come to the end of first gear, this is as fast as it can go. So we switch gears… to the next modality.

Then we’re running mentally, thinking we can accomplish a lot more by thinking. We plan plan plan, we organize and facilitate and pre-book, but we realize that, despite our best efforts, we can’t control everything. In fact, we control very little, and end up feeling exhausted. We hear the grinding, have found the limitation of second gear, and know it’s time to change!

Then we’re running spiritually, trying to influence the world through our “intentions.” We pray, we visualize, we read The Secret. We plead with the Universe. Sometimes it works, hey! Sometimes it doesn’t, nay! We want so desperately to believe that we’ve found the key, the secret, to controlling the world, but we have to be honest: all we did was exhaust another gear. But is there another gear?

I don’t know where to go from here!

I remember my friend Asa’s blue van, which he allowed me to drive from Florida to Massachusetts in the summer of 1984. It had three gears, then another place that said “OD.” Now, to me, “OD” meant “overdose,” no good, stay away. So I made sure not to put the van in OD. Only later did Asa tell me that “OD” meant “Overdrive,” or fourth gear. (So I basically burned out his third gear – out of ignorance. Sorry old chum!)

In any case, I think we are all at our wits end by the time we come to the end of third gear. We’ve been meditating for years and years, praying and OM-ing and mantra-ing and serving… and we still haven’t found the courage to try “OD” because we don’t know if it will make the engine explode or not.

So either we have to burn out third gear before we give it a try, or else… we finally meet someone who tells us what “OD” means, and we switch gears, confident that it will make us go faster. Maybe that person can be me.

Yes!, you can confidently switch to fourth gear, friends, where whatever you need comes to you before you even know that you need it. Where your heart is a beacon and you effect change just by standing in your high vibration. But you never would have tried it before… you didn’t want to believe it could be so easy to go fast, and you never would have… until you exhausted the other gears.

So go ahead, friend, run through those lower gears as fast as you can. Exhaust yourself in a hurry, and God bless you on your way. Fourth gear is a blast, and it’s waiting just for you!