LIFE skills and/or purpose: 2.0
Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2020
We ARE who we ARE physically (our genes and DNA) because these elements were factory (womb) installed.
We then grew up, went to school, and started life as adults – this installation is LIFE: skills and purpose 1.0 was beta-tested as we grew up.
We ran these programs on our hard drive (body) with our CPU (brain) with little change from then till now.
It’s a bit like running an old low-efficiency furnace without changing the filter or cleaning/replacing the humidifier media yet expecting changes to take place on their own.
It’s time to install new software. We don’t need to discard the operating system, CPU, or the body – but it’s time to run a software upgrade. Our phones and computers get upgraded all the time; we well know that the beautifully engineered package of science isn’t only exceptional and elegant, but it can do more things, do them better and faster than we could before.
Where am I going with this?
I’m going here:
I recently had an epiphany of sorts – the details won’t matter to my readers, so I’ll save them for another day, but the point was powerful. I’d forgotten something I know well. Not my skills, those tools are still in my bag – but it was the realization that I’ve not been using those instruments of expertise for way too long. The triggering events don’t matter so much, as the point does.
So, for others, think back through your career – in jobs, and businesses, a decade or two or three ago – what did you do you aren’t doing now? What skills did you use that you aren’t using now? What job did you do that you’ll never do again in that place or at that level that you can rejuvenate today, some skill set you can use with today’s tools you couldn’t have dreamt back then. Who knew then what you could do so quickly today?
Now leverage that.
Walking down the next path need never be lonely – you may not have a hand to hold or companion to giggle with, you’ll always have a past worth remembering, wisdom-building moments worth repeating, and recall tools you’ve let sit idle way too long. Sure, some of them might be rusty or need sharpening, but remember you are a master-gardener in the backyard, backstory, and background of your own life.
Remembering and forgetting are companions – walking hand in hand, smiling together and laughing, recalling moments of joy and triumph, remembering harsh lessons of failings, massive failings, and gargantuan failings.
These two keep company in our minds, clarity and colorful descriptions of what was, or what was not – blacks, greys, and taupe tones reserved for the edges where clarity of what happened or why seems to elude our grasp.
We remember context, but we can’t remember names, or we recall name-date-place but have lost the thread of what led up to, or away from, that junction of cause and effect.
Life isn’t about new chapters.
Each time we changed, we didn’t start anew, we simply installed a software upgrade, right?
What version are you using?
Maybe it’s time for an upgrade to Version 2.0
Reader feedback:
Mark, I also get ideas in the shower that sometimes slip away. I keep thinking I need a waterproof recorder. As always, love the column. LH - Lethbridge, AB
Shame is the trickiest of feelings I will say. We must be so lucky to have a support system in place to make us understand the uselessness and the unnecessary weight of it. Love the John Adam's quote, AG, Cancun, Mex
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