Today’s post comes from Penny Gundry (who also wrote A different kind of resilience). As you read this, don’t automatically think about changing roles (though that might be right for you); think more broadly about the change you might need to instigate for yourself.
Penny writes…
I was talking to a woman the other day who was telling me she wanted to try something new this September. Like the beginning of the school term for the children she thought it was time to select a new set of pencils and draw a different picture for her life. She wanted to do things differently at work and at home. It was time for a change. We started talking about transition and what that really meant for each one of us. It reminded me of the story by an anonymous writer about trapezes and transitions. As we hang on to our current trapeze bar we feel safe, it is familiar, and we know what is expected of us. But sometimes in the distance we spot another trapeze bar coming towards us. What do we do? This new bar may offer us a whole new world of many possibilities. It starts to swing closer and closer. There comes a time when we have to make a choice. Do we jump or do we stay? The decision is difficult enough but if we do let go, for a few terrifying moments we are in the void between bars with nothing to hang on to. The writer tells us:
“What this also means, of course, is that for some moment in time I must leave behind this bar and hurtle through space in order to reach the new one. Each time I am filled with terror. It makes no difference that in all my previous hurdles across the void of unknowing I have always made it. Each time I am afraid I will miss, that the new bar won’t hold me, that I will abandon the safety of what I have, only to plummet into the bottomless chasm of the unknown. But somehow, I have to take the chance. No guarantees, no safety net, no affordable blanket insurance policy – but there you are, soaring across the dark void of ‘the past is gone, the future is not yet here’, It is called transition.”
Perhaps it is that very moment of void, the place of unknowing where the biggest transition takes place. It could be the part that offers the most when we want to do things a new way and transform our lives. Are you ready to jump?
Penny Gundry Author of Glimmers of Light Dancing A Fable for Our Times
Twitter @pennygundry
www.pennygundry.com
