An easy example of commitment is marriage. If you are married, you have made a commitment to your spouse. Nonetheless, you can have arguments, you can hate each other for a day, one of you could lose a job, suffer an illness, you could have children, you will grow older, etc. All of those fall into the category of LIFE. They create a lot of volatility. However, the beauty of a commitment, how we define it, is that NONE of that stuff, none of life’s turbulence changes the commitment you made to your spouse.
This is perhaps, you might say, an idealistic vision of commitment, but we think it is illustrative of how profound an effect commitment can have on our experience of being alive. If every time something in life changes, your commitment also shifts, it would be incredibly destabilizing. You not only need to attend to whatever just happened, say loss of a job, but you simultaneously need to fret and stress about whether you and your spouse are going to stay together. This is certainly the conventional approach. We’re sure many of you reading this can recall times where life's circumstances had you questioning your commitment. It is a big contributor to stress and in fact, relationship problems.
When a problem arises, if half your mind is thinking, maybe I should just jump ship here, you are not fully invested in solving that problem. If we shift and think of a commitment to a goal, then the same applies. If reaching your goal depends on everything going your way, you’re in trouble. The hero stories we all love happen when someone maintains their commitment to their goal and stays the course, despite everything else that is going on in the world. If turbulence in life makes the future Olympian less committed to winning the gold, they will likely never compete in the Olympics.
The point here is that a good predictor of success (well-being, happiness) is commitment. It is only with commitment that we can view the volatility of life with a sense of calm and level headedness. It is the thing that is unshakeable. And that could even be something like being true to your vision, your truth.
To finding our fixed point
