Notes for Job Seekers: 3 quotes for your hopeful Sunday
January 10, 2021.
Again I sit myself down to write but I don’t feel like writing. I still have a cough and it has been draining my energy since the New Year. But I will just write without any plan in mind. Just some quotes I found lately, and some meditations on those quotes.
“Security is when everything is settled, when nothing can happen to you; security is a denial of life.”
~ Germain Greer, Australian writer, and intellectual.
How often do you catch yourself thinking about security? I can tell, these thoughts come quite often when you are unemployed. I’ve been there before, and I still keep my side gigs so I was mentally prepared to end last year and start this year in a job hunting phase. But nonetheless, the mind is deceiving. It wants you to believe that you are in danger, that you are not safe, and that pressure is something very natural to experience.
It is not.
I like how this concept is formulated by the supercoach, Michael Neill described in his books “Supercoach” & “Inside Out”:
“Children do not need a psychotherapist. They all have innate mental health.”
I am not sure it is the exact quote but you get the idea. We all have innate mental health. When we come into this world we do not have issues with it. We are balanced, we are content, we exert no effort to preserve our inner peace. We are hungry, curious, and we are very fearless in exploring the world. With time though, we learn how to fear. We are clinging to the concept of security but we forget.
Security doesn’t exist.
We think that we can get a stable job in a stable company and everything will be fine. Well, COVID exposed the weakness of this mindset. Not only companies but the whole industries can collapse in 1 month, taking your lifestyle with them to the bottom. Someone who was a pilot once is now selling street-burgers. So is a concept of security a foundation that is solid enough?
Instead, maybe we should be focusing on confidence, and by confidence, I mean forge our ability to stay still amidst the storm, keep our cool, and remember at all times that we are the masters of our ships. Maybe we should do a better job at remembering that we feel overwhelmed by all the things that we do not control only if we feed them with the energy of our attention.
Amor Fati.
That is one of the core stoic principles that comes as a complete game changer in modern life. Love your fate. Whatever happens to you was destined to happen. You cannot understand why you are going through the current situation if you are perceiving it being in the situation. You have to step back, breathe, balance yourself, and endure the test of time during which nothing is happening. Remember this:
“Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast. In the pool where you least expect it, will be fish.”
~ Ovid, Roman Poet
Look back and find your own evidence of this statement. Some of the best things that have happened to you happened to you by chance. And I am not saying that the universe is completely random. If you believe in the Law of Attraction, you can say that you have attracted them. If you believe in karma, you might think that all your actions led you to those life circumstances.
Regardless, of what you believe in, you know how it feels at times, when even after all your careful planning and strategizing, you have to deal with life situations that just happened. It feels at times that God does play dice with you. He makes his move to see how you will act in response.
And you make your move.
Sometimes the Universe complies. You might even feel like the door is opening letting you in, to progress on your path toward the desired variation of reality. Sometimes it doesn’t, and it feels like you are banging your head against the wall.
What did you learn from those experiences?
Was the lesson given so that you develop grit and learn how to persevere. Or it was merely a reminder that your attempts to control everything are laughable and can’t be taken seriously even by you. You probably know better. One thing is known for sure:
“If you bear your cross gladly, it will bear you.”
~ Thomas a Kempis, Dutch-German canon regular and writer.
Please don’t get me wrong. I do not imply that you should see your experience as a cross, a path rather. Let’s take this writing challenge for example. There are days when my writing flows, there is no “I”, the words fall into places themselves and the end result is not completely absurd and actually makes sense.
And then there are other days. The days when the internal resistance is palpable. The days when I know that if I sit and write, nothing worthwhile will come out of my fingertips. But I also know that if I don’t write, it will bother me for several weeks. And so I write.
This is my cross. My path. My trial.
The question is — what’s yours?
I know that if you stay on it sufficient time it will transform you and the new changed you will look at the world with different eyes. So to that place we go. And even our vision is blurry, our resolve is adamant.
And with that resolve let’s enter the second week of the year.
Screw security. Amor Fati.
