Hug the Butcher

Why a rocky landing works better than the perfect orbit?

The title is a metaphor, I promise. But yeah, you have to hug the butcher. The first time I realized this was when I woke up from the impromptu afternoon nap on the day when I was supposed to change everything. Go for a run, complete the assignment, eat healthy and write down 10 pages. I had managed to wake up at 6:37 only to worm back into my blanket because it would be better to start at 6:45. My eyes opened to my mobile showing 12:53 on the clock. But I had planned everything, except for the most crucial part, for the “Contact with Reality.” So what is this concept that I have taken the privilege of naming?

Well, suppose you are a space scientist. One of the most coveted jobs in the minds of 8 to 10 years old around the world. So imagine you are a space scientist and in charge of the latest lander for the surface of Mars. You planned every equipment on the lander perfectly. You thought about every possible problem that could arrive during the project. Every thing was calculated to the third decimal point. You know what you probably thought about the most, it’s the landing. The moment when that lander, which travelled through thousand of kilometers across nothingness and space is about to connect with the ground.

It is the most delicate point. And none of your calculations for the mission mean anything if that contact can’t be achieved. If your lander can’t survive the contact, you can say the mission goodbye. That first contact is the start of something tangible. That is the most delicate part about the mission. And even if you ended up becoming not the profession you dreamt of when you were a kid, first contact still remains an important part of your life. You see, most of the ideas we think are abstract. This includes the fantasies we have, dreams we see and plans we set. It is one of our superpowers as a species, to be able to think abstractly. But it also exposes us to a crucial weakness. Let us live through another popular experience, and yes, this one is not as niche.

We visit the night before the day where you will change everything. You know, the one where you set an alarm two hours before you got up today, and plan to exercise first thing in the morning. Then you plan to listen to an audio book while preparing a healthy breakfast rich in protein. Then you plan to journal your thoughts down and maybe have a cold shower afterwards. And then you’re going to “eat that frog”. Yes, that day, or more precisely the night before. And then you sleep all excited. Except when that alarm rings, you were just in the middle of the best sleep ever. So you stay 30 minutes longer. And now waking up different makes you feel funny so the “good times” in the powder room take longer. And now you’re behind so you skip the exercise and go straight to listening to the audio book. Except it feels too boring, so you put on the latest pop album. Dancing, you get to breakfast. Oops, no eggs, no legumes ready. So you put together the cereal in cold milk, finish it somehow and move for the shower. But it is colder in the morning so you end up having a warm, comfortable shower. (It isn’t your fault by the way, hot showers are just so damn relaxing.)

I hope I am not alone in having that experience. What went wrong? You planned everything perfectly. Time blocking and everything. But the truth is, your lander crumbled at contact. And no lander, no mission. And this is the crucial weakness. Most of the plans we set are amazing because they happen to be abstract. Abstract is the warm baker, his shop smells sweet, selling small cupcakes. You can have as many as you want, sweet and immediate, gone as fast as they had come. He personally hugs you so tight you melt. But reality is a butcher. There’s blood around. Screams are heard till outside from the shop. He hands you the meat left after cutting through your plans. Meat is tougher to chew and harder to digest even if nutritious. But as much as you want to be at the baker’s eating cupcakes, you still have to go to the butcher for some meat. Reality is always going to be there and your plan needs to make contact with it.

No plan will work unless it can survive that first contact with reality. In fact, every plan is a beautiful dream till it survives the first contact. My plan to be a singer was a pipe dream till I first listened to my recorded voice. That lander crumbled. My plan to be an engineer was a dream until I got my first job. This one landed well, but there’s a crater around it, AI I think it is called. My plan to be a writer was a dream until I made a Substack and had the balls to publish my first article. This had a rocky landing. But it is still better than the perfect article I imagined floating through space. My point being, the landing is hardly perfect, the contact can almost demolish your mission, but it is the one thing that turns your dreams to plans. It is the beginning of it’s dance with reality. And that terrifies you.

You do not think about this contact, not because it doesn’t cross your mind but because it scares you. It scares me. It scares everyone. It feels safe doing what you are doing right at this moment. You will also be safe when you have a habit of waking up early at 4 am. There is no failure. The space where failure lives is exactly this contact. Where you don’t know if it will stick. Unlike popular sitcoms, this will-they won’t-they of your plans and your reality is not as exciting. It is uncertain, it is petrifying but most of all, it is disillusioning. It is the point where the plan you made with complete dedication and excitement could crumble right in front of you. And that stops the lot of us. Because as long as the landing didn’t happen, I could still say to myself, “Well, once it lands, I can have the awesome results I dream of.” It’s sort of this hope that still remains that once I make the contact, everything else will be easy, a beautiful dream untouched by the bloody cleavers of reality.

Reality is a butcher of these dreams and hopes, but here’s the side no one wants to see. The abstract baker, surrounded by the aroma of cupcakes filled with sugar, is hugged by everyone. Gorging through cupcake after cupcake, we feel happy for a while and yet, we wonder why don’t we feel full. Because as sweet as the cupcakes are, they are still fluff, sweet poison. The abstract plans are nothing but a one way ticket to constant desire and empty comfort. It’s putting on weight, building inertia to not move, just having one more cupcake. On the other hand, nobody hugs the butcher. Nobody even thanks him for the meat. Even though most of the time, meat makes us full. And it’s high time we actually start hugging the butcher.

That attempt to hug the butcher is contact with reality. To actually design for the real thing, not just some abstract ideal. And it’ll not happen all at once. You’d have to move in, be comfortable with reality, make peace with failure and still be ready to take one step closer. As mentioned, most of us did not turn out to be space scientists, so our calculations will be wrong, but that is not an excuse to not try landing. Because as cliche as it sounds, failure does happen to be step one. And the biggest illusion we hold is that there is any other step one. As much as I want otherwise, most of your endeavors have the same first step. Any other potential step is a cupcake, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t trust a cupcake to handle my bodyweight. I am not saying to just spear the butcher into the torso, although it’s not the he would mind it. Start with just a thank you if you have to.

Don’t plan your complete morning where you’re going to change your life. Just try seeing when you can wake up in reality. Can you wake up a little earlier than you did today? Can you stretch a bit in the 15 minutes you get because you woke up earlier? Can you just include one source of protein in your breakfast alternate days? Touch reality. Make contact fast. Make contact often. That contact is the work. You planning the perfect day down to 15 minute increments is not going to help when you get stuck in traffic. It will just make you frustrated. Believe me, I have lost hair due to that stuff. You listening to an audiobook while travelling just might. Don’t think of the perfect day. Think about where reality can stand in the way and hug it tight. Hug the butcher and gorge on the meat. Risking sounding like my mom, you can have dessert once in a while, just don’t make it your diet.

I know contact with reality is uncomfortable. I have spent days plotting out the perfect system for my day where a more disciplined and focused version of me could probably build the next Amazon or Google in a couple of years. The me I have managed to finish “The Boys” using it. The me I have works now because the system is not imagining someone but facing him like the mirror. I learned to hug the butcher. And it still doesn’t feel completely comfortable. But it feels real and it feels full, full in a way I never felt with the baker.

Coming back to your space lander, the mission comes later. You need to survive contact first. It can be rocky, it could be in crater, it will definitely be imperfect. But the mission doesn’t start with the perfect orbit, it starts with that imperfect contact with reality.

(PS: I realized after writing this article that a book with the same name as “Contact With Reality” exists. It was not an inspiration for this article. This is purely born from my failures and my attempts to move on to better ones. Share and Subscribe if you manage to take something from me processing my own thoughts. )