Last week we talked about the difference between making LINEAR progress, versus QUANTUM leaps. While the idea of quantum leaps sounds awesome and appealing, it can also be incredibly destabilizing and scary. Everything you thought you knew is suddenly in doubt. You're reorganizing, shaking things up, and it can FEEL like chaos, pain or suffering.
Here’s the good news: the destabilization ends. The bad news is that it ends in one of two ways: you either reorganize at a higher level… or you backtrack to what's familiar.
This process can really hard, especially since our culture conditions us to view the external world of outcomes and rewards as the source of all happiness. “When I get into Harvard, then I’ll be happy,” “When I’m top of my class, then I’ll be happy,” “When I get married and have kids, then I’ll be happy.”
So we're constantly projecting into the future, focusing on getting stuff, doing things, achieving, succeeding, and winning SO THAT… we can have, do, or be what we want. And all this activity may give us the illusion that we’re in the driver’s seat, but we're not, not really (just ask anyone who's ever experienced a sudden accident, an unexpected tragedy or a serious health diagnosis). And so periods of destabilization can feel especially scary because when our happiness depends on our circumstances, it's easy to forget that we are the source of our experience of life.
If we genuinely want to level-up our way of being, working and living, we MUST find ways to weather those external shakes and shifts by becoming centered and grounded in OURSELVES, while simultaneously choosing, moment by moment, to embrace the unknown and open up to life — in all its messy, beautiful, painful, joyous, and unstable, glory.
It's in this dance that we truly expand, and in which the universe can truly revel its great mysteries to us. It's this dance that leads to truly QUANTUM leaps.
xoxo,
