Part of the caption is with respectful attribution to Ryan Holiday‘s seminal book ” The Obstacle is the Way ”
We have two options in a crisis:
- Accept the reality and accept the crisis as a catalyst for the change that we have always wanted to make..or
- Resist the reality and accept our temporary circumstances become our permanent identity
The worst thing you can do when you are unemployed is to spend all your time looking for a job. Why? because what you are doing is spending all your focus, energy and attention on the greatest source giving the maximum anxiety in your life.
Let’s remember that an economy that once rewarded people for fitting in now rewards people for standing out. Probably a rude awakening for some of us sitting around waiting.
It’s been a while since the dreaded Corona pulverised us but that said ” have we fallen prey to Cornona Fatigue? The new term that has been coined to describe our collective sense of exhaustion, helplessness and inertia.
That means we seem to have dropped the ball on our creative work and doing the bare minimum that needs to be done( plus Prime and Netflix of course!) . We got tired, frustrated and just waiting for better days.
Creativity is future proof. Some of the most remarkable works of art were created in dire circumstances and in response to adversity, social injustice and major uncertainty. Here goes a few examples:
- The seminal work of Viktor Frankl(inside a Nazi concentration camp)
- The Hemingway & Steinbeck novels
- The Diary of Anne Frank
- Picasso’s Guernica
If you have read up until this part of the rant, you would discover a gap between your capabilities and what you are actually doing. Maybe you are thinking:-
I’m my own greatest obstacle
My self-doubt is an obstacle
My own motivation and focus or lack thereof is my biggest obstacle
We may feel that there could be something better and more fulfilling to do with our time and energy
Enough of (doom)scrolling, tweeting and obsessive email checking. What else can we do and what can we do and what prevents us from doing those other things?
The pandemic has made us hyper-focused on what sucks and short sighted about other things that we still have control over.
Everyone feels like a fraud. We are all making it up. There is only one difference between people who get out of their way and those who don’t. People who get out of their way, persists, even if they feel like a fraud.
You don’t have to have your shit together in order to create.
The fact that you don’t have your shit together doesn’t mean that you are stupid or don’t know anything- it just shows that you are human.
We use our creativity to express our humanity and we connect with each other thanks to our common humanity.
So, let’s get out of our way to shovel a mountain of shit for our ounce of gold.