What has got me to take 4 cold showers this week, drop glass on concrete for the heck of it, and enter a place with my son, that I had previously been scared of going before by myself, let alone with my son? The answer, is this wonderful little book, The Flinch by Julien Smith. I learned about the free kindle book through my RSS feed to The Domino Project. The main lesson of the book is that we are discouraged from doing that which we are afraid through our basic evolutionary biology that caused us to shrink – or flinch – in fear in situations where bears might get us.
The threats of physical violence and harm from nature aren’t as relevant for most of us in the modern world. Yet we still live with “the flinch.” But we’re not flinching at bears anymore – just at the little things of life that cause of no physical harm. We’ve got to learn to overcome “the flinch” to embrace the many blessings in life we could experience that we miss out on because of our captivity to fear that doesn’t actually threaten us in any real way. I was reminded of what Tim Ferriss often says, “the quality of your life is proportional to the number of hard conversations you’re willing to have” and Dave Ramsey often says, “maturity is the ability to delay gratification.”
I’m learning to embrace “the flinch” by practicing the small endurance of pain by taking cold showers 3 times a week. I’m also renewing my habit of reading one letter a day from Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic.
