Here is another installment in getting out of stuckness – whether it occurs early, in the middle of, or late in your career.

Question for today: Why is it that what brought you (to) today won’t bring you (to) tomorrow?

Answer: When you move through life, you don’t merely change what you do. What you desire changes too. And, in another step, it isn’t merely what you do and what you desire that changes, but you yourself that changes.

Each new experience changes you. You acquire new knowledge, skills, and memories, and, from these, you acquire a different stance or perspective on your life and career. You now experience all that you experience – thinking, fearing, desiring, feeling, and acting – from out of a different you located in a different place in life and with different values.

You can think of yourself at every moment as being made up of everything you have been and have been changed by up to the present moment of your life. Each new moment continues to affect and change you – often barely at all and sometimes dramatically so – and you emerge into the next moment updated to everything you were before, plus the change the just-passing-away moment added to you.

The mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead had a saying, “One plus one is one.” What he meant is what I wrote above – I believe. Every upcoming moment adds to you, and you remain a single one, now updated. And, on and on it goes: every moment an occasion for change and growth.

Now, there comes a time in life in which the change that your life or career calls for is beyond the incremental changes that you may have become accustomed to. There comes a moment that requires a substantially different stance that comes from a substantially different you.

These times that call for a dramatic change are often born of a moment of insight in which all that you’ve strived for, although not wrong or misguided or embarrassing for that time of life, and that for which you’ve been up to the moment before, is now experienced as lacking. This is a type of conversion experience, a conversion from one way of being into a different way of being. The change the insight calls for may be in the mundane realm of daily life, or it may encompass the transcendental realm, leading to a spiritual conversion.

But whether a moment of insight is limited to everyday or encompasses ultimate spiritual concerns, it nevertheless calls for some lasting, and perhaps disruptive, change. It may seem strange to say that an insight ‘calls’ for change. After all, isn’t it you who decides to change (or to choose not to) in response to an insight? Yes, you decide, in a way, the decision has already been made for you. The insight gave you a way of seeing that made who you’ve been and what you’ve been doing until the moment of the insight now appear obsolete, no longer making sense – not bad, but already something ready to be left behind. Once you have the insight – or the insight has you – you can’t see and think and judge from out of your pre-insight eyes and mind. You have been changed. And as a result, your path forward has been changed.

If you’re still following me, you may ask, “But if these insights and the changes wrought from them are not up to me, what good is all this talk? I can’t decide, ‘Today I think I’ll have an insight that will change my life’.”

My response: Yes, you cannot will yourself into having a shattering or less-than-shattering insight. What you can do is open yourself to and invite such insights. You can do this through gifting yourself the time and space for insights to come. No one can decide to longer allow your mind to be always occupied with all these endless mundane concerns, news unworthy of news, and all sorts of noise I call ‘the din.’ Insights sometimes arrive with the force that pushes aside all manner of ‘din,’ but often they arrive on cat’s paws, in the quiet of the evening or night, as you drift to sleep or break to wakefulness. And do not merely gift yourself that inner quiet, but also listen for that which arrives from out of it. For some, writing things down and following a train of thought leads to new vistas through which can be seen what hasn’t been seen before. For others, entering a flow state from physical or creative activity can invite an insight.

Last: many of us may have already experienced deep insights. What we ‘heard’ and ‘saw’ from them may now be known to us. But we have never acted on them, nor made the changes those insights called for. In such cases, those who experienced such insights may now be particularly pained because they continue to live in what they’ve already ‘seen’ is obsolete, and that has already lost its sense. Yet they remain halfway, still inhabiting a world already that’s been superseded. In such cases, what is required to ‘consummate’ the change and bring oneself into the new reality already felt and seen? Here, mundane and careful planning plays a large role.

Almost all of us have already established many important commitments that it would not be right to break. But there is always an opportunity to ease out of one way of being and doing into another way of being and doing, even if it requires many steps undertaken over many years. The goal is to be ‘on one’s way’ towards this new reality that has been felt and seen but not yet lived. I might even offer: one never reaches the destination offered by the insight. Rather, one reaches it by living near it. This is what is meant by “the journey is the goal.” It is, and often it is the most we can hope for, and often it is enough.

Until next time,
Dr. Jack

Quotes of the Week

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” – Henry Ford

“The secret of change is to focus all your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” – Socrates

“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” – Andy Warhol

“Recognizing that you are not where you want to be is a starting point to begin changing your life.” – Deborah Day

“I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.” – Angela Davis