Sometimes, acting crazy is the sane thing to do
Twice a week, I meet with Rob. We are both working to help men become better fathers. It’s great to have that accountability and check in on how things are going. During yesterday’s meeting, Rob said he would do 30 podcasts in 30 days. My immediate thought was Rob was crazy. Normally, we don’t like looking crazy, weird, or otherwise out of our minds. It means, so we are conditioned, that something is wrong with us. Crazy, in this view, is a symptom of something inside of us that is off. This view may be valid if you are wearing a tinfoil hat to protect yourself from an alien/satellite brain control via delta waves conspiracy. Sometimes, though, a little crazy is just what we need.
How do we get to the point where we are crazy or crazy options appear sane? Day-to-day pressures build up and, when we don’t address them, make us go a little crazy. We get stuck, as Einstein said, because “Problems cannot be solved with the same mindset that created them.” Our normal thinking leads to ruts that limit what we can see and what movement we think is possible. I’m a (fill in the blank), and I do (fill in the blank). That’s who I am, and that’s my life. We can get trapped by a limited vision of who we are and what we are meant to be. We never realize how deep the rut is until we climb out of it. My head is still spinning after quitting teaching after 23 years and realizing all the new options I have, but today is about Rob, his crazy idea, and ruts.
Ruts, to make matters worse, are comfortable. We feel safe because, while we may be bouncing around in the confines of our rut, there is naïve security in believing that everything outside of the rut that we can’t see won’t affect us. For Rob, the idea of starting his podcast was daunting. The fear of putting himself “out there” was keeping him in a rut. He was safe, but from what? That’s a good question for us to ask ourselves: What am I protecting myself from?
If the answer is anything besides sudden death, there is a good chance some of what we protect ourselves from is living out our authentic lives. Life is full of stressors, but many are self-imposed. There are billions of people who don’t care about us and won’t like what we do if they even notice we’re alive. We aren’t living with billions of other people in our lives, only ourselves and the immediate people around us, and some of those people also don’t care about us. That’s not a bad thing; it’s a reality thing. You, me, and the guy with the tin foil hat on do not have time to care about 7 billion other people.
Fear is often the common denominator for so many of our limiting choices: Fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of ridicule, and at one level, it makes sense to avoid those risks. It’s a surface level, though, and it’s a sign of immaturity. Let’s be clear: Fear is not a sign of immaturity. Fear is an emotion like any other, so we should acknowledge it. This is not the same as validating it. Validating your fear as “reality” as opposed to a reaction to what is happening and basing your decisions solely on fear is a sign of immaturity. For the record, I am probably “immature” at least 3 times a day. Fear is one tough mother of an emotion.
How we face our fear will determine whose life we end up living: the imagined life you think other people will accept or your own. If you’re going to live your own, there will be times to embrace “crazy.” To quote another famous 20th-century philosopher, David Lee Roth, “I’m goin’ coconuts but least I’m going my way.” That’s the power of a little craziness – it’s a chance to break out into authenticity. Crazy isn’t the authentic part, it’s the goal behind the crazy that is.
Rob isn’t crazy; he’s just doing a crazy thing, 30 podcasts in 30 days, as a way to break out of a rut and move towards his goal of helping single dads be better fathers. When his 30-day challenge is done, I will ask him to do a guest post on what he had to do to make this crazy goal a reality while still meeting his work and family obligations.
Until then, I’ll leave you with three things: Rob's Second Podcast about being present as a parent, David Lee Roth's "Going Crazy" and this question, if you’re stuck, what kind of crazy action or challenge could you tap into to get out of that rut?
