Stick with it.

Jeremy Rumble
Sep 8, 2018 · 4 min read

Sometimes you have to lose your path in order to find it. This happens when we begin to doubt where we are on our path, or if we’re even on it. We see everything around us and wonder: “How did I get here?” At some point everything is good and we begin to wonder which way to turn because it’s all great. That’s when the doubt sets in. If we can choose /anything/ then what should determine *what* we choose and which direction we go?

Thus we begin to create things that are perhaps less than ideal… Situations in which we seem to have a limited set of choices available; the thought being that we can then figure out what might be determining our choices. If only we can come up with a rule of thumb, then we might feel secure in living the life we want to live. Because we *know* it.

People like to say the phrase “At a certain point” to indicate a “turning point” or transition where things changed. There are books of people describing an out of body experience as a life-changer. Perhaps a decision. It could be anything, but it also usually comes with retrospect. The thing is, living through the change doesn’t have to mean that it’s sudden for us to really know that things have changed, and are changing.

While, things can change quickly, they can also change very slowly. Think molasses flowing uphill. This is why retrospect seems to make things clearer. What’s actually happening is that we’re constructing a story. Here’s one now:


Between the wings of an airplane and the open air, there is a small layer of air which adheres or sticks to the surface of the wings. The same is true for the airplane itself, and with water, the bed of a river. This layer is called the boundary layer. The layer of water nearest to anything on the riverbed will stick to it — ie the speed of the water will be zero, compared to the rock, or what have you — other water molecules, par exemple.

The same is true for the flow of events in our lives. Sometimes it seems like a door opens and everything changes, or a door closes and everything changes, or a door re-opens and everything changes… though perhaps a new door. Or a window. An opportunity arises.

When things change quite suddenly, it’s as if we are a molecule of air which had previously been sitting happily stationary on top of the airplane wing and suddenly we are tumbling through turbulent air. A molecule of water holding onto a stone, suddenly flowing freely. When we are simply flowing with our peers, things change gradually because we are at what’s called “free stream” velocity–we and our peers are flowing at the same rate relative to each other.

Going back to creating less than ideal-seeming situations, living through our idea of the thing that we think is our rule of thumb, we keep adding to it, modifying it, and with that, modifying how we view the world. We are constructing our very view of the world by how we already view the world and then viewing the world from our new story.

Figuring out that mnemonic for motioning ourselves to join us determines the us we join as well as the who. We become. Taking a step back we realize that our very doubt can be applied to the story we’ve created and so we see how our beliefs have affected the course of our lives, and with that, the moments we see as having been formational of those beliefs… in essence, how we’ve been creating our life by dreaming our beliefs into existence by the direction we’ve already been choosing: the doubt about the validity of our path. The very doubt about our path can help us back on it by showing us that the seeming non-ideality of the path, being our own creation of an attempt to validate ourselves, is just as valid as wonder just how wonderful things are. Just as valid as living without the need to know in advance where one is headed and the ability to know just that.

TL;DR
From simply being, we start to notice, then we start to doubt, then we notice our doubt and doubt that until we realize that we’re running in circles panicking about which way to turn to stop running in a circle until we stop and we realize that everything’s a circle and the only thing to fear is sphere itself… and then we laugh and either get on with reading or bugger off to do something else.

For more information on fluid boundary layers, see:
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/37760/what-is-boundary-layer-exactly

Writing prompt from an article by Mitch Horowitz:
How quitting writing made me a writer
https://medium.com/s/i-quit/how-quitting-writing-made-me-a-writer-27067348acee

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