Finding Inspiration in Everyday Life

I think I can speak for most of us when I say that sometimes it's hard to feel inspired. You want to feel motivated, go after your dreams, chase that physique you always wanted, but somehow you feel tired, lacking the energy necessary to accomplish all of these things. Let me start out by saying that chasing goals and wanting the next thing isn't always what gives you satisfaction in life. In this article I want to share a different perspective to what meaning we give the word 'inspiration', and how we can feel inspired by the mundane tasks of life.

The difference between motivation and inspiration

Let us first take a small detour in explaining what the difference between motivation and inspiration is, since I will be using both terms quite a lot during this article. Motivation refers to the process that initiates, guides, and sustains goal-oriented behaviors. It is the drive to act and achieve specific goals. Inspiration on the other hand, refers to a sudden burst of creativity or insight that often comes from an external source or an internal realization.

Why do we feel motivated?

People that know me will sigh at what I'm about to say, since I can't seem to shut up about it, but I love bouldering. So much that it's getting its own article very soon. When I started bouldering, my progression went very fast. I was going multiple times a week, and it felt like every week I could climb higher and higher grades. It was motivating, thrilling, and it made me feel inspired to keep training hard, day after day.

After a few months, however, things started to slow down a bit. I was still getting stronger, and I was still having fun, but the grades weren't really going up anymore. I hit my first plateau, and while my passion was still there, I felt my motivation dropping a little bit. Why am I telling you this? Is this just another excuse to flex my boulder progression? No, this is a perfect example of how dopamine works in our brains and how it affects our motivation, and in turn how inspired we feel.

Chasing dopamine

Getting better at things and increasing grades we can climb gives us huge hits of dopamine. These hits of dopamine reward us for our behavior, and gets us fired up to climb the next grade for our next hit. This continuous chase for dopamine makes us goal-oriented, needing accomplishments to feel happy.

I'm not saying this is entirely a bad thing, since having goals and feeling good about accomplishments is, well, kind of healthy right? Yes, but the problem is with balance. What if we still work hard, but we're stuck at our current grade? Shouldn't we still be happy? Is our self worth only tied to the things we accomplish?

Relying on dopamine for our happiness is becoming a dangerous thing in this world, with external sources drowning us in dopamine whenever we want. Aside from dopamine, we also shouldn't let our accomplishments define who we are as persons. We are all complex characters with unique roads to travel, and our self worth isn't tied to our destinations. This is where the title of the article comes in, since I believe there is a way to feel inspired without endlessly chasing the next thing.

Detachment from our goals

We can accomplish this by detaching ourselves from our goals. By doing this, we can create space to enjoy our actions instead of our accomplishments. By focusing on the feeling of grabbing plastic rocks, instead of what the sequence of plastic rocks is graded as. I will admit however, that applying this concept is harder than it sounds, but with practice everything becomes possible.

We can practice this by applying mindfulness, or meditative practices to our everyday life. Meditation isn't just sitting in lotus pose with your eyes closed, but encompasses an extremely wide range of practices for our mind.

My favorite way of doing this is going for a walk. Instead of thinking about how many steps you still have to take today to hit your 10k, focus instead on your environment. What flowers are growing next to the sidewalk? Can you see the insects that inhabit the greenery around you? What about the air, did you notice how it fills your lungs? How does it feel against your skin? These are all sensations we so easily miss when we're so stuck in our own head.

Conclusion

We get too hung up on what we accomplish, that we forgot to truly experience what we do. By enjoying the process, focussing on our actions instead of our outcomes, we can find inspiration in these otherwise mundane tasks and motivate us to experience the world as it is. We don't control our outcomes, we just control our actions, so let us focus on that and let the outcome be whatever it is meant to be.