Within the context of the way change occurs in nature, what we call “being stuck” is only a perspective of a temporary state within the oscillations of difference and repetition. Okay, before you fall asleep or flip to the next post, hear me out a moment. This has to do with managing yourself in your career, your life, your relations, what have you.
That’s right, in the overall flow of things, your work in a stuck state is only a single consistency, perhaps a grip or foothold, in natural system of random variations. It is important to the overall system for you to stay stuck so that its random generation of novelty does not go completely off the rails.
But that also means that your best practices and content of your certifications, as well as all of your current expertise, are mere grips and footholds already collecting dust as they are formed. All of this material was most valuable as it was being generated from the process of discovery, before someone isolated a set of skeletal variables and produced a methodology. We are ever taking pieces of these artifacts and attempting to gather what was suitable and valuable in a past that produced them, and applying them to a present and projected future that may have left their relevance behind.
Gregory Bateson suggested that both mind and nature proceed in similar ways, in that both produced novel material randomly, and then kept a storehouse of things that worked, or survived. Gene pools, that are constantly innovating themselves through reproduction and accidental deformities, or mutations, will be more or less useful in various contexts. It’s not so much about the survival of the fittest in the sense that the strongest animal gets a more reliable source of nutrition and reproductive opportunities, as in classic interpretations of Darwin, but particular features, as in the specific shape of a sea creature’s fin that may make it fleeter at certain depths and levels of pressure, and not others, or the formation of an eye structure that may be more sensitive to a particular segment of the light spectrum that occurs in predators in a particular forest.
Your mind too, is a randomness upon randomness in a similar way, since it is, like the fin or the eye, that randomly, or what Bateson called stochastically, produces novelty upon stored patterns, except that it is also a bit like a complete natural system in itself in that you have the opportunity to generate endless novelty during a single lifetime, whereas the sea creature only gets a single life with a single fin.
As we amble on we need both feet. We need the foot that is rooted in the ground, the one that is stuck, and the one that is travelling through the air, unbound. They take turns. The foot freeing itself is reliant on the foot that is currently stuck, and vice versa. The pattern will then repeat itself, and we will walk ahead, make progress. The feet will also then need to know when it is time to change direction, turn a corner. But the feet cannot know when to turn a corner, something else must do that.
We are ever the feet, sticking to our familiar systems and practices, following the footsteps of others, which is good, but we are sometimes also the thing that turns the corner.
The walking that moves us ahead, the one foot before the other, the switching, these are good habits to get into. We can follow them in our sleep.
Until they are no longer good. You wake up one day and you realize that so much you have grow accustomed to, sets of patterns or behavior and knowledge that have worked for you for so long, are no longer good habits, maybe even bad habits.
But you identify with them so, after all, they are you, what you have become, and it may even be a painful realization. And to me, that’s all the Buddha meant by ego and attachment. It’s that simple, and you don’t have to burn incense and sit for hours by a golden statue to understand that. The incense and the golden statue are maybe more habits and attachments, just more steps in the same direction when maybe you need to turn a corner.
The doggy tricks you’ve learned that have made you useful, desirable, up until now, that are no longer helping you satisfy your needs, were things you had originally put on, but you have may have confused the garment for the thing the garment is meant to conceal, to cover, to protect from the cold.
I’m not saying this for the sake and hope of some greater salvation, only that we need to work, and sometimes need to be the foot that is rooted to the ground, and sometimes need to be the foot that is flying through the air. And sometimes, maybe more often than we think, we need to be neither foot, but the thing that can turn a corner.