Sacrifice and Focus

For years, you felt burdened with to-do lists, things to accomplish and steps to be better that didn’t seem to make much sense to anyone else. You sometimes wondered if you were going mad. There was always something to do better, some critical flaw to fix, some behaviour to work on, but everyone else seemed to think you were fine, that you should relax, that you should enjoy. You got anxious, feeling you needed to balance everything - the profession, the hobbies, the social occasions, the physical health, the mental health. You felt like you should relax and veg out on the couch because other people were - that it was the ‘thing’ to do. You tried it once, and enjoyed it too but felt like you wasted time thinking about all the things you could’ve accomplished in that same amount of time. Dare I say, feeling shameful.

Then, finally, something clicked. It might have been a TV show, a book, a game, or a sport. You no longer felt guilty investing your time here. You could spend your time here and feel rewarded. You pushed yourself to go as far as you could go. The deeper the invested time, the better.

But this devotion of time sets up in our minds – and in our collective culture – a powerful and potentially problematic ideal: that if one enjoys one’s time devoted to something, then one should always be entitled to time for that thing. That anything that stands in the way of that thing is a barrier to one’s happiness or enjoyment.

Then, inevitably, comes a moment of crisis. Perhaps you received a pivotal career opportunity simultaneously conflicted with a previously planned engagement with your lover. And now, with the sense of deserved enjoyment – in the spirit of having found fulfillment in multiple areas of your life – you mention a desire for both options. But, on this occasion, there was no option for both, only an either-A-or-B scenario, a forced choice. There was no eager accommodation for both your desires, no resolution that neatly fits your needs. Just a simple, painful decision, a sacrificial option for the prosperity of the other.

We come up against a fundamental conflict within the modern understanding of productivity and accomplishment. Not accomplishing everything we desire seems like a betrayal of productivity, a commentary of incompetence. At the same time, the complete simultaneous chasing of competing tasks vying for your attention eventually appears to place the accomplishment of both in mortal danger.

The idea of accomplishment is sublime. It presents a deeply moving vision of how one can maximize their time and it is an ever-growing list signifying success. But there is a problem: we keep wanting to make this same pace of accomplishment for the entirety of our lives. And yet, in order to be accomplished in some things, and in order to achieve the level of success in certain aspects of our lives, it ultimately becomes necessary to abandon or sacrifice the development of other areas of our lives.

We are perhaps too conscious of the desire for success or achievement in all things; we haven’t paid enough attention to the noble reasons why, from time to time, true accomplishment may lead one to sacrifice one goal for another. We are so impressed by achievement, we have forgotten the virtues of sacrifice, this word defined not as a cynical sign of failure, of incompetence, of inefficiency, but as a dedication of focus to the true, prioritized focus.

We should learn from the art of compromise, the discipline of negotiating priorities, of not always wanting the moon AND the stars and the flexibility of not doing every single thing one wants, in the service of greater, more strategic ends. The completion of one of the aforementioned goals.

We will never make progress with the larger projects if we can’t stand to be unaccomplished, at least some of the time, in one aspect or another. It is assigning too great a weight to all our desires to let them all always be the guideposts by which our lives are governed. Some guideposts must be abandoned to successfully navigate to others.