Day 38 (2008-04-12): Safe and certain
April 12, 2008 by Curtis G. Schmitt
Exploring pleasure has led me to a realization:
My need/desire for certainty takes the life out of my life.
A couple of months back I noticed that I was repeating this strange cycle in my business. I’d get frustrated by doing things conventionally, so I’d think of some exciting outside-of-the-box idea for how to build my business. Then I’d immediately try my best to force it into a box! Then the limitations of that box would frustrate me and the cycle would continue.
Why am I not sitting on a beach somewhere coaching my clients from a lounge chair? Why am I taking my unconventional career and thinking about it conventionally?
The structures of the hourly wage, Monday through Friday, 9 to 5 job are what I’m most familiar with — it’s what most of us are most familiar with. That’s what feels safe and certain to me.
Paradoxically though, because I don’t have that kind of job, I don’t have the other things that come with it: consistent weekly income, insurance benefits, paid vacation time, etc. So this paradigm is both safe and painful. It’s the knot in my stomach.
But what if I embraced the freedom that my career choice allows me? What if the walls of the box fell down? What does the landscape look like beyond those walls?
One Response to “Day 38 (2008-04-12): Safe and certain”
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I SO know what you mean. We choose an unconventional life because we don’t want a conventional one, yet we then try and judge our lives by conventions, or create conventions when we’ve consciously decided we don’t want them! That might partly come from the fact that we have so much freedom to do things in the way that we want that we’re afraid we’ll do something wrong or miss something. We KNOW that people (most) work certain hours - 9 to 5 is considered a normal working day - so subconsciously we probably think that’s the right way, even if we consciously rejected it. It feels unfamiliar and in some way unsafe to allow ourselves to work, say, from 1am to 4am, or from 12 until 4. We kinda ask “am i really allowed to do this?”…