The night that wakes you
The night that wakes you is equivalent to life waking you up to ask you how much you’ve been going through the motions vs living with intentionality. It’s a necessary reckoning, a worthwhile recalibration.
FN 📕 The Night That Wakes You
- Author:: Dushka Zapata - Author of “Your Seat Cushion Is a Flotation Device”
- Tags:: how to live an examined life, how to tell if you’re having a mid-life crisis
- Source:: Source Link, The Night that wakes you, Quora answer
What’s interesting about this?
- This need to apply a critical lens throughout the course of your life is similar to metacognition in that it’s taking a bird’s eye view of the ingredients your life is composed of and studying them, sometimes in intricate detail and sometimes just granularly (in large-print).
- It’s quite possible that taking a look at what’s important towards the end of one’s life might be worth considering at the beginning. This is a common theme I explored during Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl and Top 5 Regrets of the Dying by Bronnie Ware.
- When we know how to die we can truly live, because we fear not truly living more than the fear of death.
- You’re going to be dead a hell of a lot longer than you’ll be alive. Why the hell would you spend your one, precious life doing something you have no passion around?. (PRNs with [[Tim Ferriss]] and Danny Meyer on [[LN 📘 (665) Danny Meyer on The Tim Ferriss Show]] - ABCD, Hiring Process, Watering Plants (podcasts)
The Night that Wakes You
Imagine that you are walking down a long, winding road. You have heard countless stories about the wonders you will come across and as you continue to walk you arrive at the realization that this road is actually quite hard. So hard. It’s hilly. It’s rocky.
Why didn’t anyone warn you? You walked alongside people you thought you’d be on the whole journey with and as it turns out they have all picked different paths. Maybe you too should have gone left instead of right? And this pack you’re carrying is too heavy. Plus, you left behind certain supplies you thought you wouldn’t need but you do. You do.
You set the pack down, wipe your brow, stretch out and look around. Wait a minute. This road is not what you thought it would be. You are perplexed, bewildered. You feel lost. Is this the way it’s going to be until the end? There has to be more, right?
This is a midlife crisis. It’s less about unhappiness and more about reckoning. It’s necessary recalibration. The term “mid-life crisis” is a misnomer, for two reasons.
First reason: This need to set everything down and take a good look around is not something that happens in the middle of your life. It’s a recurring theme throughout an examined one.
It’s school and the friends you hang out with. It’s your boyfriend and how much of yourself you have willfully given over. It’s realizing your parents are not always right and cannot keep making decisions for you. It’s what the heck you want to study in college or if you want to go to college at all. It’s your first job, oh my god I don’t even know what I want this cubicle feels like a prison. It’s questioning things you had blindly taken for granted. It’s who am I supposed to marry, it’s I want a divorce, it’s nothing, nothing is in its place how did I end up in the wrong life. This is the wrong life what am I doing here?
Second reason: This is not a “crisis.” It might feel like one, but look at it. This is you, coasting along and suddenly waking up. It’s terrifying at first and then slowly you reconsider what you are carrying and who you are walking with and review the turns you have taken and gather your courage and make the adjustments that need to be made. Then, you dust yourself off and set back out on your way. Because, you can always dust yourself off and set back out on your way.
Questions related to the text
- How does the pathway to living with [[integrity]] (4 stages) and finding comfort in our zone of genius relate to living an examined life?
- How can we develop a framework or questionnaire to help guide is in applying a critical lens to our lives?
- What questions can we answer to help factor in our interests and goals into our lives more?