The tension inherent in high achieving

Just a moment before, I ran through a familiar "dreaming" sequence. I dreamed of completing my work on residential energy efficiency policy. About learning to program much better and building apps to help society. Inspired by the 2019 book, Prepared, I dreamed of helping revolutionize K-12 education. These are all pretty noble pursuits, nothing blameworthy in the pursuit. But, I had a momentary notion of great significance: there's tension in the dreaming.

Every time in life when I have in this dream mode, there's a tension. The idea develops and then a fervor, "I want to have it. How do I get it?!" And then the tunnel vision. And then the hijacking of the mind.

This is not true of all achievement. In learning to play the violin at age 38, there is surprisingly little tension. I'm really bad. But I enjoy it a lot. I'm not thinking about that big dream of "making a difference". I'm just focusing on the thing at hand. I'm absorbed in the activity, not the dreaming.

That focus isn't just for small-scale dreams. When I'm absorbed in programming, I'm absorbed without tension. I hesitate to hitch on to a popular phrase, but it is like a "flow" state. And, there, I'm not focused on this big dream of what I'm going to build. I'm focused on trying to understand the documentation on TileMode and gradients.

The issue seems to be the self consciousness of "high" achievement. There's a lot of wishful thinking, "if only" thinking. The greedy mind is trying to get the goal. And my mind is searching all the paths to get there, thinking, "if only I do this, maybe I'll get this piece. What about that piece?" That search could be done calmly, like planning out a route to run routine errands... something without a lot of involvement. But, there is a clinging when it is high stakes: like planning out a date with a promising guy/gal. Clinging.

There is a catch-22. To build something big, one does have to plan. And it is worthwhile to do big things. But, if the bigness is too high stakes and focal, I now have a sense that that is going to involve a lot of tension. unhelpful tension. And, I want to be aware of that tension.

The Buddhist path is for the heedful, those who are willing to put in tremendous focus and effort (eventually, not necessarily at the beginning). But, I want to be careful. If I approach it in my customary manner of aiming for the high achievement goal, there's going to be a lot of stress and tension involved.

So, I'm left with a puzzle. How to achieve without lots of stress? How to put in lots of effort without stress? My watcher is watching for the unnecessary clinging that I bring to the achievement planning. Now I have an inkling of a guess about: the "if only" thinking is source of the tension in high achievement.