I’ve been reflecting upon my fears that are holding me back from making progress with my life’s work and I’ve made an interesting realization yesterday.
In the past, I mentioned that I thought my fears were strictly based upon the difficulty of trying to communicate to someone that we don’t see reality directly but are instead perceiving a map or construct of it instead. Needless to say, this is a pretty difficult thing for someone to comprehend, yet at the same time it seems like a critical foundation that I need to discuss before I can build upon it.
For example, in talking to my family about my work the other day, my brother mentioned that in his cultural training for his work, he learnt that it was important to respect people’s narratives about their perception of reality. So these narratives are like bubbles of belief (as noted by Dave Gray) that spin around in your mind and prevent you from seeing reality directly because they act as filters and thus provide you with a different constructed perception of reality instead.
But when reflecting upon this, I realized that my fears go beyond this because that’s just the logical aspect of my work which ties into vertical development. There’s also another fear that relates to this that describes the metaphorical side of this. What I’m talking about is how I metaphorically describe this “not seeing reality directly and instead seeing it as a construct” as a “game”.
You see, I’ve noticed a pattern in the past, that when I describe my work, I can describe many of the metaphorical aspects about it (i.e. monsters as fears, quests as questions, etc), even talking about the role playing aspects of it, and many people seem very receptive to it (probably because it relates to the Hero’s Journey). But as soon as I start talking about life as a game, that seems to create a threshold within people that they don’t want to go past. And that in turn creates a threshold in me, that I don’t want to go past, because of my fear that others will not accept my work and thus not accept me.
As I noted before, this in turn creates a Catch-22 situation whereby I can’t really progress with my work because I feel dependent upon others acceptance of myself before I can really accept myself. Yet if that’s the case then I’m not really maturing and becoming independent, which is accepting myself and being at “home” with myself without people’s acceptance, am I?
What this is making me realize is that if this is my primary “constraint” then I need to step towards this fear somehow and leverage it, using it to my advantage rather than disadvantage. In other words, if I can help people understand this foundational aspect of my work, that everything else is built upon, the rest is fairly easy in comparison. It’s like finally learning how to open a stuck water reservoir gate and allowing the water within it to fully flow outwards into the many crops I’ve already planted, letting them finally grow and flourish.