Blog 9.The Love Song of J. Alfred Pressfield

The coffee itself tasted deep and rich, but the stamp on the takeaway cup struck a dull note—I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. Ah, that’s so sweet. At first glance all sounds good. It evokes the warm energy typically associated with coffee houses along with the back-of-the-napkin conversations had there. That being said, such a gaffe should not have slipped past marketing.

Misinterpreted, ‘coffee spoons’ is lifted from TS Eliot’s poem A Long Song for J. Alfred Prufrock. It follows Prufrock, a broken, middle-age man facing the stark reality that his life, full of ease and seductive comforts, has been half-lived, one watched from the sidelines.

*Prufrock was published in 1915. You can find a complete version online. I highly recommend reading it. It take 15 minutes to read it, but so worth it

Prufrock is a tragic character. He reflects all of our stillborn dreams and regrets back on us. His repeated observation in the poem: they come and go talking of Michelangelo—seemingly not paper cup worthy–sums up his coffee spoon life. The contains all the supposed, but not actually, important distractions and false knowledge that keep us from doing what matters to us. Had Prufrock truly gone after it, instead of merely talking a good game, pre-occupied by false busyness, he might have become his own version of Michelangelo. Who knows?

Say it’s true that a version of Prufrock lives inside us. What would help him? Heeding the message in the War of Art by Steven Pressfield would be a good starting point.

If you’re any sort of human, this will sound familiar. The instant I feel the urge to expand my comfort zone and expose my vulnerabilities, my demons go full-nuclear, using every weapon: doubt, shame, fear in order to obliterate any and all motivation to do it. In The War of Art Pressfield calls this force the resistance, and in his words, it’s a real motherfucker. Unavoidable, but, if you’re up for it, manageable.

Say a powerful urge to take a risk overcomes you: start a business, ask someone out, enrol in a dance class. You feel yourself doing it and imagine how you might be changed by the experience. Then in the very next instant, those resistance tentacles dig in, using every imagined public humiliation to snuff out your just-born desire. ‘Be realistic,’ it says, ‘other people do those things. Not you.’ That’s the bad news.

Take heart, the resistance is natural. Absolutely everyone feels it. Maybe even once upon a time heeding its caution helped us to survive as a species. Now the resistance just gets in the way, preventing us from finding out the thing we are supposed to do.

There's hope. The next time you find yourself rag-dolled inside a resistance spiral, try to remember this. Your urge to change or walk a new path came first. The resistance you feel is merely a reaction to your desire. This means that it's a secondary force and therefore the weaker of the two. The resistance can only exist because of we desire to stretch our capabilities. That part blew my mind.

I think both Eliot and Pressfield would agree on this next bit. Grab the shooting star, take the chance, and risk failure, do the exact opposite of what Prufrock does. The next time you want to take a risk–sing karaoke, go back to school, change jobs–simply watch what happens right after the idea pops in your head. Don’t judge. You will come to see how belligerent and weak the resistance is.

Our job is to overcome the resistance. Even in those times when we do manage to beat it, success is in no way guaranteed. Nor should it be. The resistance keeps coming at us, and that’s part of the fun. And to that end, our battles against it will prove far superior to coffee spoons for measuring our lives.