Love the diversification metaphor Alex and the idea that a diversified personality portfolio makes suffering a loss in any life area less painful. I personally recognize the strategy and have used it pretty much as you have described. I'm not sure, however, it protects us against suffering the way you've described, or the way I myself have hoped it might. I have had the experience over and over of keeping myself busy in many domains, with many "irons in the fire," and have found myself not getting to the one thing I am most passionate about, most called to serve at a given time, and suffer as a result of the "diversification." When I finally say "enough" and get down to serving that current singular purpose, the suffering of my self-induced distraction lifts and the more I serve the purpose, the more my identity actually fades into the background, as the work, not my identity, becomes dominant in my attention. As I believe you mentioned, this is complex business, with many tendrils and nuances, requiring a great deal of vigilant self-observation, ruthless self-honesty, not to mention a sense of humor (like keeping track of how many times one's watch has been hurled against a wall) to make it through the labyrinth. The best protection I have found against suffering is to surrender to the most dynamic and engaging work, and if it's all I am doing for a time, and that work comes to end, or doesn't achieve the result that I wanted or hoped for, it's a chance to observe the way I create suffering for myself by investing in future outcomes rather than present process. This is such a juicy topic. Thanks for your thoughts on the subject and for letting me feed back into the conversation. Interested in your perspective, or anyone else with a personal experience in this domain.
This is a great message, and I think hits home for a lot of people. Especially ex-athletes where our identity was just that, athlete. Then we graduated and had to figure out how to hold onto that identity or grow as a person and find a new identity that made us happy. I know it was a lesson that took me a hot minute and several obsessions to figure out
Love the diversification metaphor Alex and the idea that a diversified personality portfolio makes suffering a loss in any life area less painful. I personally recognize the strategy and have used it pretty much as you have described. I'm not sure, however, it protects us against suffering the way you've described, or the way I myself have hoped it might. I have had the experience over and over of keeping myself busy in many domains, with many "irons in the fire," and have found myself not getting to the one thing I am most passionate about, most called to serve at a given time, and suffer as a result of the "diversification." When I finally say "enough" and get down to serving that current singular purpose, the suffering of my self-induced distraction lifts and the more I serve the purpose, the more my identity actually fades into the background, as the work, not my identity, becomes dominant in my attention. As I believe you mentioned, this is complex business, with many tendrils and nuances, requiring a great deal of vigilant self-observation, ruthless self-honesty, not to mention a sense of humor (like keeping track of how many times one's watch has been hurled against a wall) to make it through the labyrinth. The best protection I have found against suffering is to surrender to the most dynamic and engaging work, and if it's all I am doing for a time, and that work comes to end, or doesn't achieve the result that I wanted or hoped for, it's a chance to observe the way I create suffering for myself by investing in future outcomes rather than present process. This is such a juicy topic. Thanks for your thoughts on the subject and for letting me feed back into the conversation. Interested in your perspective, or anyone else with a personal experience in this domain.
This is a great message, and I think hits home for a lot of people. Especially ex-athletes where our identity was just that, athlete. Then we graduated and had to figure out how to hold onto that identity or grow as a person and find a new identity that made us happy. I know it was a lesson that took me a hot minute and several obsessions to figure out