Every week I make tentative plans to attend a local jam night. And every week, I fail to show up.

I’ve no idea if it’s true that 80% of success is showing up, but it certainly appears to be a necessary condition of accomplishment. I love improvising, I love playing covers, and, despite my shyness and social anxiety, I love being on stage. However, all of these things require me to make it out to the jam night in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong – there’s usually a good reason for my non-attendance. The requirement to be a parent. The exhaustion that results from being a parent. A prior commitment at a family event. My musical companion bailing on me after over-indulging during an unexpected pub lock-in the previous evening.

As ever in life, we must be mindful that specific, justifiable reasons don’t turn into low-hanging excuses. For instance, I intend to continue being a parent for the rest of my life. And, having spent most of the last 20 years feeling exhausted, it seems unlikely that the future holds anything other than perpetual fatigue.

So if we’re consistently failing to show up, it’s a good idea to ask ourselves whether there might be a deeper reason in play. Depression? Fear of failure? Fear of success?! Even the laziest of excuses, “I can’t be bothered,” begs the question, why?

Obviously, if the underlying explanation is that we just don’t want to show up – maybe because we don’t enjoy the activity, or we despise the other attendees – then that’s fair enough and shouldn’t be discounted. Throughout our daily lives we’re already forced or obliged to do plenty of things we’d rather not do. Why add to this list?

That said, my cousin frequently professes to bouts of self-loathing caused by his inability to get started on the things he genuinely wants to accomplish. He has no excuses, as he’s removed every conceivable obstacle in his path. He’s not an idle person, and I have no reason to doubt his motivation. He sounds utterly sincere in his desire to show up, and absolutely devastated by his consistent failure to do so.

My cousin is a major factor behind my growing conviction that free will is an illusion. And if that’s the case, then presumably I’ll either show up at the jam night or I won’t, and if I don’t, I probably shouldn’t beat myself up about it.

Photo by Chris Fuller on Unsplash