The Looking Glass is a weekly newsletter of timeless wisdom for you to ponder on your journey of growth. I hope you find great value here.
#16 – 12 Aug 2022
Hello friends,
Thanks again for being here!
Here’s an insight, a question, and a quote I reflected on over the last week.
💡 Behind the bars
This week I came across a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke called “The Panther”. The following verse caught my eye:
From seeing and seeing the seeing has become so exhausted it no longer sees anything anymore.
Robert Bly (translator), News of the Universe
The world is made of bars, a hundred thousand bars, and behind the bars, nothing.
I assume the poem, being called “The Panther”, is about a big cat trapped in a cage. But those lines can ring true as a metaphor for being stuck in a dead-end job or a difficult relationship.
We feel trapped in the job like we are locked away in a forgotten prison. After a while, we lose sight of the outside world and forget what it is like to be free. We lose our belief that work can be fun. We become cynical and pessimistic. Feeling trapped in a labyrinth, we can see no way out. Maybe we require that steady income for certain financial obligations, or we have been burned in the past for taking a chance with a significant change.
But there is always a way out.
We must work up the courage to take the first step into the unknown. How we get to that courage can be tricky. A helpful way for me was to realise that the path I was on and avoiding my dreams was scarier in the long run than the consequences of implementing a change. I also came to view failure as not something that will wipe me out, but rather a stepping stone of growth on the way to mastery. This all helped me find that much-needed injection of courage.
Or sometimes, we need an external push. The pandemic did this for me and forced me to make the move I had been sitting on for way too long. Once the world turned upside down, I felt I had less to lose as everyone was now struggling in uncertainty, and it felt comforting having an excuse if things didn’t work out, so I went for it!
From then on, things started to open up. One thing leads to another. Take that first step!
❔ The paralysis of infinite options
We often feel paralysed by the infinite options we have on the table.
Which job should I take?
Which business should I start?
Which partner should I settle down with?
What suburb should I live in?
Should I travel now or later?
Should I write a book?
Each of those questions opens up another infinite amount of sub-questions.
Do you know that feeling when a big decision hangs over you and wears you down? It can be exhausting – decision fatigue. So we just procrastinate.
Then more time goes by, and we further beat ourselves up for lack of progress in each domain.
What if, instead, you just picked one thing and committed?
After all, we can never know for sure in advance what the “right” option is. The perfect solution is often a fantasy. So why not commit to something, make peace with it, and work to make the best of it?
Oliver Burkeman triggered this insight for me while reading his enlightening book Four Thousand Weeks:
“When two spouses agree to stay together ‘for better or worse’, rather than bolting as soon as the going gets tough, they’re making an agreement that not only will help them weather the rough patches, but that also promises to make the good times more fulfilling, too – because having committed themselves to one finite course of action, they’ll be much less likely to spend that time pining after fantastical alternatives.”
Once you commit to something, things get easier. Then you can rule everything else out. Suddenly you are drowning in a myriad of never-ending options. You now have all this extra mental bandwidth available that we previously expended on weighing up those major decisions.
Burkeman continues:
“In consciously making a commitment, they’re closing off their fantasies of infinite possibility in favour of what I described, in the previous chapter, as the ‘joy of missing out’: the recognition that the renunciation of alternatives is what makes their choice a meaningful one in the first place. This is also why it can be so unexpectedly calming to take actions you’d been fearing or delaying – to finally hand in your notice at work, become a parent, address a festering family issue or exchange on a house. When you can no longer turn back, anxiety falls away, because now there’s only one direction to travel: forward into the consequences of your choice.”
I love the sense of ownership in Burkeman’s words there, on moving “forward into the consequences of your choice”. Recognise there will be consequences of your choice, and that is ok. Remember, there is no “perfect” solution. The important thing here is actually making a decision and moving forward versus wasting another five years in that state of indefinite limbo.
Could you reframe that FOMO (fear of missing out) to “the joy of missing out”?
💬A Quote to Ponder – You don’t have to go on an adventure to make discoveries. The way you look at things matters.
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
Marcel Proust
Cheers!