In our last +1, we did some swooping and gliding and hunting with a red-tailed hawk and our bird-watching guide: Carlos Castaneda.
Today I want to chat about that hawk again.
I mentioned the fact that he’s not worried about whether or not he’ll find his prey.
He’s just hunting.
Calmly, 100% focused on the PROCESS.
Letting the outcomes take care of themselves.
He’s not up there flying around thinking to himself, “OMG. My family’s going to starve if I don’t pull it together and find a mouse soon. I’ve been flying around up here for TWO HOURS (!) already and I haven’t seen a single mouse. Where’d they go? OMG. OMG. OMG.”
Enter: Castaneda and his wisdom: “Once a man worries, he clings to anything out of desperation; and once he clings he is bound to get exhausted or to exhaust whomever or whatever he is clinging to. A warrior-hunter, on the other hand, knows he will lure game into his traps over and over again, so he doesn’t worry.”
Now…
To be fair (and to state the obvious), our red-tailed hawk friend doesn’t have the prefrontal cortex to engage in any anxiety-provoking overthinking. (Or, well, any “thinking” for that matter.)
Which reminds me of some parallel wisdom we explored back in the day.
Remember our ?
As you may recall, that one was inspired by a pre-Trail drive. As I stopped at a stop sign right next to Byron Katie’s little chapel in Ojai, I spotted a squirrel racing across a telephone wire and thought to myself, “I wonder what that guy’s thinking?!”
Then I reminded myself that he WASN’T THINKING.
Then I thought of some wisdom from Jon Eliot’s Overachievement.
He tells us: “Great performers focus on what they are doing, and nothing else... They are able to engage in a task so completely that there is no room left for self-criticism, judgment, or doubt; to stay loose and supremely, even irrationally, self-confident... They let it happen, let it go. They couldn’t care less about the results.”
That’s Today’s +1.
That red-tailed hawk?
He’s the flying embodiment of great performers.
Let’s be like him a little more.
TODAY.
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