Why don’t you use the new stuff you buy, your new course, your new capacity?
What happens when you get anything new?
Is it always good news?
After all it’s shiny, after all it’s new… and yet… you are not using it.
Why? Are you crazy?
No, actually you may be intelligent.
New things, a new relationship, a new baby, a new job are disruptive to your current life… disruptive is a good word to use here.
And you are not ready to disrupt, you are not willing to be disrupted.
Why fix something that is not broken?
It’s another thing when you grow into it… then it’s organic, and maybe even seamless.
And yet, we want to take wild turns, wild jumps… at least in our imagination.
The two students who take to the new capacities the fastest and easiest have a track record of starting new things, and integrating them into their lives.
If you don’t… then you will have a problem with new capacities.
New capacities may show you that you have been wrong all along… Did you want to know that? Do you really want to start life all over again?
I remember my first such experience, back in 1977: I suddenly had an insight, that the ideology I lived by, communism, was not good for anyone.
It was not an intellectual insight, it was a life shattering experience, an experience it took me months to recover from.
But without that, the experience that I can build a new life, not just survive the loss of everything I believed to be true, was what started me on the path that has lead me to where I am.
I then quit my job and started a business. Then I changed countries, twice.
I changed professions. I changed ideology. I was willing to question everything.
You haven’t, probably, have any experiences like this, unless you did.
Living in another country is a great prerequisite. New language, new culture, new challenges. If you suffered… nay. But if you succeeded, then you have fulfilled the first requirement of what it takes to become an expanding human being.
Even participating in a student exchange program can qualify you.
Taking a trip and having to work to make money to continue the trip.
Unless you know yourself as someone who can, you don’t know yourself as someone who can.
It should be a parent’s biggest desire for the child to kick them out of the nest.
Even a bird won’t fly if it is not kicked out… Sometimes the desire to fly is not stronger than the fear to fly.
For most people, growing where you are, so your small life feels like a prison, is the way to go.
Then when you are too big for the small life you live… you’ll start the process of shattering it…
It’s not an accident that my incident in 1977 came on the heels of winning first prize in a national architectural competition.
My life was suddenly small to hold it all… so I shattered the walls of it.
It was still traumatic, painful, but it was more like a snake shedding its skin that would prevent it from growing full size. The new skin needs to mature, toughen before you can take it out for a scroll or a spin.
By the way, from the outside, including from your mind, it looks like you are procrastinating.
We could say procrastination is when you say “I should be doing what I am not ready for.”
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