powerless beyond measure

2018.10.21
Marianne Williamson wrote a poem that starts:
it is our light not our darkness that most frightens us
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
(this passage is sometimes falsely attributed to Nelson Mandela)

Personally it feels more like the deepest fear - or at least the one that drives procrastination and lack of ambition of all types - is that we'll put in a really good effort and not get the results we wanted, that the world will prove as daunting as we feared. When you've failed to put in a good effort, at least there's that fig leaf of you not trying - maybe there's still that untapped potential in you, maybe you still have untapped settings up the dial.

(I have my todo list clogged with all these not particularly hard or sometimes even necessary tasks, but what if I clear all those out and life still isn't just grand?)

I guess the remedy is there is like Eric Barker said:
"Are you afraid of the task? Why? Does it have a knife pointed at you? No. You're afraid you'll do a lousy job. Well, you're gonna do an even worse job if you don't get started."
...
Also it reminds me of that Vonnegut quote: "Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?" (Not sure what the procrastination version of "unexamined" is - "unprocrastinated"?)