Want to be Self-Aware? You Need to Be Okay With Instability
We are killing ourselves by living this way
How do people stay in the same job and same organization for years?
I’m talking day in and day out, doing the same thing every single week.
How is this the idea of stability and not insanity?
Someone in the organization I work at said they would never want to do any other job or work for any other organization.
This statement made me look them up.
This person has already been in this position for 10+ years. They had seen many leaders come and go and have stayed in the same capacity for these years.
Now, many people may say that if they are working in their dream role, their job responsibilities align with their strengths and passions.
I agree with this.
But don’t people think about what’s out there for them?
Beyond their immediate front, above the capabilities they have realized for themselves, don’t people get curious about the world or themselves?
It’s like you discovered a fish dish; it has been your standard weekly order.
Maybe this recipe was new fifteen years ago, but the world has developed beyond that fish recipe. What about the varieties of sushi and various ethnic recipes for fish, oysters, lobsters, and octopus that are prepared across different cultures?
Does something not spark in you to try a different meal for the heck of it?
Imagine the scope of the ocean and the innumerable sea life gliding through the tides, with some of them deep in the bed of the sea, and you have been choosing the same species prepared the same way for 15 years.
A couple of years ago, I was learning to swim at a private facility in my hometown.
One of the lifeguards was a woman in her fifties working there for 12 years.
She once told me that she had never had an increment to her salary since she had been employed with them. The facility would tell her that it’s not like you do much here, so why should we pay you more?
And you didn’t look for another job? I asked her once.
“No, I mean, this is fine. It’s stable,” she told me.
I couldn’t understand this.
Twelve years is a lot of time to develop any new skill of interest, change your situation, or simply get more diverse experience in what you’re already doing.
So, where did the reluctance come from?
The fear of losing what we have in hand against the prospect of something that doesn’t exist.
Maybe my young blood was questioning it. Maybe my young energy would want to disrupt this status quo approach to life.
But I challenge the idea that we are sent to earth to settle with finite ideas of potential.
I find it uncomfortable that we should put a cap on the number of skills we can develop, the money we can earn, and where faith and a little courage can take us.
It's terrifying to leave the world knowing so little about us and the world we were sent to.
The more I listen to lectures on faith, watch documentaries of wildlife on earth and in oceans, and what space and the far vast universes hold, the stronger my belief goes that there’s so little we know.
If there’s so much to learn and explore about the universe, what about the internal universes we carry in our bodies?
Looking up at the clear blue sky on a beautiful day and allow it to give you the feeling of infinity.
Why does this feeling rise in our chest?
Because you can see only as much as your gaze would allow. But you know for sure that there’s a whole spread of sky beyond your field of vision.
And sometimes, that means closing your eyes momentarily, adjusting your face on an angle to take in more of what couldn’t be absorbed from the previous angle.
Our internal universes are the same.
Why limit ourselves to one environment, one way of living, when there’s a whole world waiting to be experienced?
We are not getting out of here alive, but we might as well get curious about what doesn’t exist in our grasp and live a little.
Thank you for reading this. My name is Haniya, and I write about perspectives. Subscribe to get my stories directly in your inbox.
