Just a break here in the post-adventure-flight writing …
One of the advantages of physical adventure, versus professional or life adventure, is that the periods of time in which you’re really in between paths is fairly limited. You’re on one route, or you’re changing directions or taking another route. You have some decisions to make about staying with one course or shifting, but you can’t afford to wander aimlessly for too long. You’ll run out of fuel, food, or daylight.
Life adventure is not always so cut and dried—something I remembered again while reading a column in the New York Times Sunday Business section, a couple of weeks ago.
The author, who is now a self-employed public relations consultant, describes his two and a half year period of “introspection and redirecting” that he went through when he realized he didn’t want to spend the rest of his career as a PR person at Nike.
The author talked about working with a career coach, reading career books, writing in a journal (I refuse to use the word “journal” as a verb. It grates on my writer’s nerves like nails on a blackboard), imagining a hundred different possibilities, listing strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes, and doing a lot of painful introspective searching. And still, it took him two and a half years in the limbo of “I don’t know” before figuring out the seemingly-obvious-in-hindsight option of opening up an independent PR agency.
It reminded me of something I believe the novelist and teacher Alice Walker wrote about advice she gave to her students. She told them that the “I Don’t Know” stage was an essential element to growth and change; that out of that limbo, if they could resist the panic it often generated, answers would emerge. Slowly, quietly, and only if they were open, calm, and silent enough to hear them, perhaps, but they would come.
The thought resonated with me at the time. And now, some 10 or 15 years later, it feels even more true. Every time I’ve had a jump in learning, or growth, or found a much better path or direction, it’s been preceded by a very uncomfortable period of dissatisfaction, of searching, and feeling as if I didn’t fit with my old life or path very well anymore, but not quite knowing what to do about it.
It’s easy to see a new direction, once you see it, or leap onto it, as a grand adventure. It’s harder to see the uncomfortable fog and limbo that precedes it as anything grand or adventurous. But it really is part of the package. And finding the courage to exist calmly in that limbo, working within it to find answers and clues to a direction, instead of panicking or impatiently trying to force your way out of it, is a really valuable skill to develop. As Alice Walker was trying to explain to her students, we should not fear the uncertainty of darkness. For out of it, comes light.
