Warning: scatological material ahead. Reader discretion is advised.
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Remember Spitz sunflower seeds?
When I was in high school, Spitz sunflower seeds were all the rage. Buy a bag of those for the game, or the party, or the beach, and you knew you had hours of cracking spitting chewing pleasure ahead of you.
I always thought eating them was rather straightforward, but, as with most things in life, there’s always someone who muffs the obvious to hilarious effect.
As my buddy told it, years ago, some poor schmuck at summer camp challenged the natural order of sunflower seed eating, and paid for it dearly.
One day, whether out of ignorance or bravado, this kid ate his sunflower seeds whole: seed, shell, and all.
Now, no doubt his digestive tract could have handled a swallowed shell or two without issue.
But this kid ate the whole damn bag this way.
For an hour or so, it seemed he’d gotten away with it.
Then came the quaking.
After hours spent hunched on the toilet in misery…
After his groans grew into howls of pain…
It became apparent that the massive, shell-thickened turd that had formed was too large and compacted for excretion.
Despite his clammy, red-faced efforts… despite his urgent need to expulse… he could not shit it out. He was thoroughly, excruciatingly bunged-up.
What’s more, the chewing had broken up the shells, turning them into a thousand little knives, so that even the smallest push was sheer agony.
With great haste, they called the camp nurse to the cabin.
Upon arriving, she quickly concluded there was but one option left.
And so, in a scene dreamlike and horrible, the nurse put on her latex gloves and began to extract the massive clump from his rectum manually, one handful at a time…
…the “don’t eat the shells” lesson burned into the poor kid’s brain forever.
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You and I are not so daft as to bung ourselves up with unspat seed shells.
But men suffer a type of constipation far more ruinous than a humiliating bout with a nurse’s glove.
You have filled yourself with knowledge, cramming in hundreds of hours of book reading, course taking, and seminar attending…
You’ve poured in countless hours of thinking, dreaming, scheming… loosely planning the empire you would build, if only X, Y, and Z were in place.
Your whole life has been spent in preparation: plowing the soil of your talent, rototilling your heart and mind endlessly, setting the stage for your eventual outpour.
Yet despite all this planting and preparation… despite all this pouring into yourself… all is more or less as it was before, your life and station unchanged.
You had meant to serve as a conduit of value, but instead, you have become a value sink. You have become the place where value goes to die.
It is the great bung-up:
The value you invested into your life so you could in turn amplify it and pass it on to others in the form of products, services, and artworks has become stuck inside you, and the pain of it hounds and haunts you endlessly.
The anger and helplessness you feel isn’t some proof of inadequacy:
It’s a call to find your courage and ACT: it’s the holy, tireless inner command to break up the clod and finally put all that investment to work.
The time for preparation is over.
Before you grow old and bitter…
Before you grow reclusive with regret…
Before your children lose faith…
Before the weight of what could have been crushes you…
Snap on the glove and get the shit out.
The world is waiting.
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Bryan Ward is the founder of Third Way Man and author of the LIT Black Paper
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