Name your teachers
|MC_PREVIEW_TEXT|
View this email in your browser (|ARCHIVE|) “We don’t learn balance until we are pushed off balance.” —Richard Dryer via the Project Camino podcast (https://overcast.fm/+IosoOneJI) In life, we treat balance as a necessary state, because it’s the act of remaining upright and steady. And yet sometimes losing your balance is what you need to allow and accept as a creative pro.
To stumble a bit. And hurt a lot.
It has the effect of stripping away a lot of what you carry—the possessions and beliefs you hold as important—only to discover how little of it really matters.
Science tell us it is a function of all living things to strive continually to achieve balance through homeostasis: essentially maintaining a stable, consistent environment. That milieu interieur, as 19th century physiologist Claude Bernard called it, doesn’t just explain a life-sustaining condition.
It also describes a state of conflict that sometimes needs to occur within things to prevent a greater harm from happening: much the way your immune system works to fight off infection.
Name your teachers
Some changes are not of our own choosing.
There, it comes down to a matter of perspective about the external factors that inform the way you think and the way you work.
You can choose to label the people and things that knock you off balance as harmful. Or you can follow the advice I was once given by a wise yoga instructor, which was to name all things as teachers.
Not all teachers in life are good at what they do. Some don’t even understand their own lessons. Some are even oblivious to the harm they do. The darkest of all are those that are indifferent.
But the experiences they teach are necessary and valuable. Much like the rocks (https://us4.campaign-archive.com/?u=89226eb68936fc712577977b8&id=1afdbca2eb) I fought against on the Camino de Santiago earlier this year.
Be your change
And what of the changes that are of our own choosing?
Sometimes doing this can feel as though you are defying the laws of nature, because we are each slaves to the fear of loss (https://us4.campaign-archive.com/?u=89226eb68936fc712577977b8&id=a8f2d936e1) .
Often, you break that fear only by choosing to be the force that knocks you off balance. Only then can you understand what that stable, consistent environment you seek really looks like. Or ought to look like.
What happens next is where your most meaningful lesson awaits you.
Regaining composure afterwards should not be an exercise in returning to a previous state. That’s a recipe for failure and foolishness. Instead, as Nassim Taleb reminds us: “the resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile (https://us4.campaign-archive.com/?u=89226eb68936fc712577977b8&id=0e4c0fe203) gets better.”
When you lose your balance—whether by circumstance or choice—and then regain it, do so with the intent of finding a better way of working, of living into yourself and of being in the world.
Very best, Patrick
P.S. You help me a lot each time you share CreativeBoost with friends. Do that now using either of the green buttons below. http://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=|URL:ARCHIVE_LINK_SHORT| Share (http://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=|URL:ARCHIVE_LINK_SHORT|) http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?url=|URL:ARCHIVE_LINK_SHORT|&mini=true&title=|URL:MC_SUBJECT| Share (http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?url=|URL:ARCHIVE_LINK_SHORT|&mini=true&title=|URL:MC_SUBJECT|)
============================================================ Copyright © |CURRENT_YEAR| |LIST:COMPANY|, |IFNOT:ARCHIVE_PAGE| |LIST:DESCRIPTION|
Our mailing address is: |LIST_ADDRESS| |END:IF|
Update your preferences (|UPDATE_PROFILE|) or unsubscribe from this list (|UNSUB|) .
|IF:REWARDS| |REWARDS_TEXT| |END:IF|