Some mysteries… are not meant to be solved.
This is a thing I say this to myself a lot lately, when I am too lazy to solve a mystery.
I was reading a book about career transition recently, which is a thing I find myself possibly in, through absolutely no fault or decision of my own. Like most business/self-improvement books it would have been better as a magazine article and does not do what it says it will on the jacket, which is help you somehow.
The takeaway is about how you have to think of career transition not as the result of a sudden burst of inspiration, but as a period of existing in two places at the same time. Less a light bulb turning on and more one version of yourself slowly fading as another version of you slowly sharpens.
The idea annoys me even though it is possibly exactly what is happening to me right now.
Disparate selves existing in one reality is an idea very similar to one I found in another book I read last spring, when I was in my job search. The takeaway there was about quantum realities, and how if you want some aspect of your life to be different, you must envision and fully inhabit a state of being analogous to how you would feel and act if your current reality was already that. By doing this you create (“””manifest”””) that duplicate reality in the quantum field and draw the reality of that future towards your current reality.
It sounds like the power of positive thinking but the author very explicitly says This is not the power of positive thinking so it must definitely not be that.
I had a very OK sure why not approach to this at the time, my job search being beyond desperate. I wrote every day (for like….a week or two) and meditated about what life would be like, how I would feel inside, when I found my next job, a job I liked, where I felt appreciated, etc. And I guess it kind of happened because a few months later I had this job, had those experiences.
Whoever just yelled Wow the white college educated male eventually found another job everyone, OK, just, that’s not the point I’m trying to make.
My point is that both things happened – I also inadvertently opened up this new branch of reality where I’m doing something different from what I’ve been doing the last 20 years and now have this existential concern about what is my career, what am I supposed to be doing, is this sustainable, what do I need to do to make it sustainable, should I not be doing this, is this new path taking me too far from where I was safer/more secure, which version of me feels more me, etc.
It’s not even really the career aspect of it that bothers me. Work is whatever, I can do a lot of different things. It’s the identify stuff, the not knowing, the in-between-ness of it. The what was I then, who am I now. There’s no career transition, there’s just transition.
Also: (sorry for this but) hard to square this with my the concept of time is a psyop stuff, but there is that. Like there isn’t me now vs me then vs me someday, it’s all overlapping versions of me. Is visiting our future selves materially different from visiting our past selves?
But whatever disregard that and think of transition as being in two states at once, so I’m here and I’m there, watching that version of me fade slightly out, but not completely. Like come on. The book does not have advice on speeding up the fading out of your former self, but you can see how it would add concrete value to the book.
If I envision what that information would look like if it had been included in the book (here I go creating new realities in the quantum field again), it would be something about: this path you’re on now is the same path you’ve always been on. There are not two versions of you, or if there are, every day there are two versions of you, yesterdays’ fading out as today’s comes into focus. What’s important is being where you are, not wishing it away.
This sounds very Life’s a journey not a destination but I very explicitly say this is not life’s a journey not a destination, so it must definitely not be that.
Does change happen only over the course of a lifetime? Or not really at all? Do you ever see it happening or can you only recognize it later? Do you ever actually see and know where you are going, or are you really only ever just hoping each footstep takes you towards something….something.
Who knows, some mysteries are n