Oh wow! I think I just had another major breakthrough.
While thinking about why I’m having difficulty trying to connect everything up together, I told myself to try to focus on how things relate to see these connections. In doing so, I immediately thought about what I said before about how “The Future of Work is Being Yourself.” Yet to truly understand yourself, you have to go spelunking within the dungeons of yourself to discover the treasure of who you are, which mirrors with Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey.
At the same time, this reminded me of Richard Bartle’s book MMO’s From The Inside Out where he said that people play games because they get to be themselves and that’s all anyone “anywhere throughout history have ever wanted to be.”
But this adventure within ourselves to understand ourselves also reminded me of the Berkana’s Two Loops Model which looks striking like Joseph Campbell’s Hero Journey because the liminal, unknown, limbo world of the Hero’s Journey is similar to the outcast space where the trailblazing “walkouts” of the Two Loops Model end up.
But what’s interesting about everything I just mentioned above is how it relates to my previous post whereby I said I’m trying to integrate these different layers of my work. In effect, what I described above are different contexts and perspectives that all relate to one another, helping me to perceive and make sense of this bigger picture.
There’s just one big catch though. The process of making sense of this bigger picture isn’t easy. In fact, it feels dizzying, almost like going through a maze.
And as soon as I thought about, I remembered a picture that looked like a maze from an article I read yesterday. The article is about mental health, whereby it states that “struggling with your mental health can feel like being trapped in a maze.”
Suddenly when looking at the image in the article, I realized what I was experiencing in relation to my work and why it was so difficult to make headway. My work feels like a maze because I’m making lateral shifts through different contexts and disciplines (assuming you view my work as sideview stack of layers turned sideways). So I may start within one contextual layer, shift to another, and then move from that one to another, which may then take another shift and move me back to the original contextual layer.
So if I’m understanding what this realization and breakthrough is about, it means I need to organize my work beyond just connections but also into layers (kind of like three dimensional chess) because the layers will help me to better understand the shifts and metaphorical meanings between each contextual layer. In doing so, it may help me to organize and visually map it out, thus finally making sense of the larger meaning of it all.