Un(b)lock yourself, wherever you are.
block /blɒk/, verb
past tense: blocked; past participle: blocked
1. make the movement or flow in (a passage, pipe, road, etc.) difficult or impossible.
From time to time, we all arrive at the place where we feel that we are getting stuck. It is hard to make a movement in any direction. To make things worse, usually, this feeling goes hand in hand with the confusion and lack of clarity.
Do you know that place?
It can feel like there are many other things that are waiting for you, but you have no clue what they are or how to get to them. It is very easy to fall into a trap of thinking about the big picture and the famous “meaning of it all”.
There is an addictiveness to thinking when we are stuck. We often have a feeling that somehow the right answer will just come to our head if we think about it long enough! So we start to analyze, predict, imagine, and control future outcomes. And soon, we can see that we are running around, catching our tails. The more we think, the more blocked we are. The more blocked we are, the more we try to think.
It just doesn’t work. Although we would often like it to be different, we cannot think our way through stuckness.
So, what is then a solution? What is the way out? Should we just forget about the future, and repeat our days over and over until something miraculously comes up?
There is only one thing that is effective in dealing with stuckness: movement.
You might think now: “Of course smarty pants, but isn’t the definition of the problem that it is hard to move?”
The thing is — we tend to think about big movements. Huge changes. Significant life decisions. And that makes us scared, or desperate, or even more stuck. Don’t fall into that trap!
The key is to search for any kind of movement that you can do, in any direction. Find the thing that you are ready to do, however small it is.
Instead of asking yourself where will you end up, simply ask yourself — what is the next thing that I am drawn to?
As Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön in her book “When things start falling apart” says — very often you don’t know where things are leading you, but you know what is one next thing you need to do.
Silence down your noisy mind and connect to your inner world. At this moment, what is the next thing I am being drawn to? What is the next thing I want to explore and learn?
The best part is: It doesn’t need to be logical at the moment. You just see one puzzle and life is asking you to take a leap of faith. You can be drawn to start with a new hobby and maybe in a few years, you will realize that you can use those skills in your next job, you met a very important person there or you have your own exhibition. You cannot plan it.
The same goes for your professional life, personal life, and very often for big changes and projects at work. You just need to plan how to get to the top on the first next mountain (very often it is just a hill). From there, you will see new horizons that will lead you to the next road, the next hill, the next mountain.
You don’t need to know where to end up, you just need to find the small movement that you can do now. Life will do the rest.
