What if I left my job, packed my belongings, electronically disconnected, boarded a plane, explored the places I have always wanted to see … and then started again?
I recently received a copy of Timothy Butler’s book “Getting Unstuck – How Dead Ends Become New Paths.” While I have only started reading it, the first chapter highlighted a few interesting passages that are worth repeating here.
Remaining Stuck: “… we are afraid of the dark. We want to move in the sunshine, walk along familiar streets, and have experiences that are sure to give us pleasure. We want to feel that most of life can be planned that we have a reasonable chance of avoiding pain. The idea of staying with things just as they are, without a plan, of suspending our model of how things work, puts us at a frontier of unknowing, which is to say at a place that is “dark” to our previous conception of things, to our plan for ourselves and our notion of how everything works. We avoid this dim frontier, and so we stay stuck.”
False Reasoning: “Sometimes we can’t help seeing impasse as failure, rather as a necessary crisis in the service of larger creative movement. There is a danger of internalizing the experience of impasse as evidence of personal deficiency, as a statement about our self-worth. This can be painful. We may need the help of a friend, coach, or counselor to reflect the reality of the situation back to us and remind us that this is a tough time and not a statement about who we are in the core of our being.”
