There’s something I’ve been reflecting upon the last day or so and I’m trying to makes sense of it. It relates to patterns I’ve experienced in the past of having major breakthroughs but then also stretches of drought, where I feel completely detached from my work.
The keyword that keeps appearing relating to this is immersion.
In effect, within vertical development, to level up one needs to step outside of the worldview they are immersed with, so that they can understand its hold upon them and how it can limit them. I’ve describe this as turning around and stepping back from your life (and perhaps up out of it), so as to be able to reflect upon it and your sense of self from an objective distance.
But to level up, one needs to explore, navigate, and storylive a new worldview, of which the final act is to fully immerse oneself within it and thus live and embody it.
If you think about Dave Gray’s work within Liminal Thinking, including his illustrations relating to our “bubbles of beliefs”, it’s almost the exact opposite of what he’s showing. In effect, he shows a person standing on a tiered pedestal with a bubble of belief encompassing them at the top of the pedestal. To transform themselves, the person steps out of the bubble and down the tiered pedestal into the unknown. But eventually they step back up another tiered pedestal, perhaps with a broader worldview as a larger bubble of belief.
What I’m saying here though is that your worldview is paradoxically like the water you’re swimming within. It’s like the water that’s around you, like the water in a goldfish bowl which represents your bubble of belief. And similar to water in a container, it creates a lens which distorts one’s perspective of the world, just like our bubbles of belief do.
And transforming oneself and one’s worldview is like stepping up out of one container of belief and stepping into another (via a series of tiered steps). It’s a completely disorientating experience that seems completely unnatural, even though it’s a natural process of change and growth itself.
But getting back to the focus of this post though. Why I think I’m experiencing obstacles in my work and development is that I’m not fully immersing myself within it on a daily basis to fully complete the process of my transition and transformation. What I mean by fully immersing myself is filling my mind with work that has a deep emotional connection to me, thus sparking this bigger picture of it which I can then fully step into.
For some reason, this reminds me of something I read about creative work, perhaps from The Marginalian, whereby highly creative people don’t wait for inspiration, they create it. In effect, they create and cultivate an environment that emotionally stimulates them and creates a creative work flow for their work.
Whoa, wait a minute. While this relates to creating a conducive, physical work space at home, this also touches upon my digital workspace online. In effect, this is perhaps what I’ve been struggling to try to create with my work. That being a digital space as a website that I can return to daily that will help me to quickly immerse myself not just within my work but within the worldview it’s trying to create as well.