For a phase in my life I lived off grid.
For a phase I worked in software engineering—an entry level job in my late thirties.
That cultivated a bit of humility.
Not that I’m above doing hard work. It’s just the fact of what it feels like to attain a certain level of comfort in one domain. It feels nice. And then to switch to another entirely. To put on the paper hat, so to speak, and flip burgers.
Flipping burgers is honest work. But what’s most humbling about a career change like that is how you’re expected to really embody the role.
Switching roles is good medicine, though, and I recommend it. It’s great for peeling back the layers of the onion of self.
Any stretch of time spent in a role gets you to respond as if that projection of you is who you are.
Every day, Master Zuigan would call out to himself:
“Master!”
“Yes?”
“Are you awake?”
“Yes, yes!”
“From now on, don’t be deceived by others.”
“No, no, I won’t!”
He would have this dialogue with himself daily.
Anything can be fine for a stretch of time. But too long in any given role can be problematic. I have found it necessary in my life to make hard pivots into other pursuits and then to go deep with them.
Each phase strips something away. The corporate phase especially, even as a grubby work-from-home engineer. When you’re a part of a corporation, the company culture gets you to show up clean-shaven in every possible way. The more time you spend in that meme the more you stew in the dogma promoting being streamlined, optimized, and made presentable for the algorithm. You become aerodynamic in the worst possible sense.
More people lose themselves in the corporate world than in any monastery, cult, or remote commune. At least those places acknowledge they’re asking for your whole identity. The corporate world pretends it only wants your 9-to-5, then somehow ends up with your dreams, your language, your very way of seeing.
Before you know it, you’re a hairless corporate being, smooth as a Ken doll, optimized for a healthy retirement in the great machine.
This next phase for me is about writing from joy, fascination, creativity—the love of it. Enthusiasm and humility, and not the corporate kind that’s really just fear dressed up nice. Real humility that comes from facing the blank page and knowing you might fail spectacularly and that’s perfectly fine.
Not a concern of the mind managing risk and reputation, but the mind as a vessel used by the will. Just as language becomes a vessel used by the person with a desire to make a feeling tangible.
Time to get woolly and strange and forested. Tend the wild plants that grow on the paths.
You want some sort of permanent home, some stable identity, but nothing works that way. We’re standing in the rain our whole lives, eroding. And the rain wins in the end.
Master Zuigan has the wisdom—keep checking in, keep asking if you’re awake.
“Are you still you under there?”
“I’m looking for me. Give me a minute.”
“Don’t let them polish you too smooth.”
“Too late. But hair grows back.”
Write, and rediscover your voice
I think everyone should pivot from time to time.
Pruning the weeds away helps you discover what wants to grow. A writing practice gives you a temporary home in the wilderness.
I love working with people making life pivots who want to adopt writing as a practice. Reach out to me.