Be Whole Life - Not the Hole

Sometimes we have a different view of life because we are a different kind of leader and we are not the one's hired by a nation, or by Google or even by the local entrepreneur down the road.  That should not prevent us contemplate the path that makes sense to us and in so contemplating take us off the long-term, just because the short-term pressure weighs heavier.

All I can say here is that in this personal learning journey, what is I believe in and why that belief cannot be traded in for a lesser view of the future - or else I lower the trajectory of my life.  I believe firmly in the LIFE PATH and not the CAREER PATH. 

Those that believe in the career path, that is their choice and they are branded by that choice and they deserve to live a branded life.  What if the life path I leads me to a frugal existence?  What if the life path I lead leads me to the Promised Land?  Either way it is my life path.  I alone have the right to live my life along a life path rather than plug myself into a career ideology.

The branded life is split into three, the whole life is ONE.  There is a sacred space in the making whenever three becomes one or at least it is sacred as I choose it to be.  What others consider sacred is their business, their life.  I don't speak on behalf of any organization or any life here, for I have fundamentally made it clear that the personal learning journey I pursue here is mine and mine alone.

I see no reason to be a clone of someone else.  I see no reason to be someone elses crony if they for a short-while have different expectations shaped more so by short-term realities. I can only live in learning as a long-term reality because the Life Path is long-term.  We have been conditioned from the moment we enter education to expect a social income not a life outcome.

The certified I thought are those in sanitariums, but our asylum is found in our education system, or work systems and our retirement systems.  Like everyone else I can be given a birth certificate, certified at birth - educational certificates, certified at school - employment certificates - certified as employees, a Life-time achievement certificate - certified as a career and then the one certificate we never get to receive, a death certificate - certified as certified.

If I see this, it is because I see this and if I write this, it is because it is the thinking that emanates at this given minute in my mind.  I should not engage in a stupid practice of comparison shopping because comparison limits us - we begin searching for the ideal, as if we are immortal.  We are not.  We are mortal.  My learning journey is cognoscente of this mortality.

My favourite movie is "Good Will Hunting" and there are many great scenes in it where Will Hunting says "Maybe I don't want to spend the rest of my fuckin' life sittin' around explaining shit to people" It is the lines we remember in movies that inform us individually of our affinity. That kind of sentiment is central to my own personal learning journey.  I view it more like Star Trek and the Captains Log - we never ask why Captain Kirk is keeping that log other than it is used in the scripting of the screenplay - when it comes to our own life, we have one screenplay that is not written but lived every clicking second that we have and expect to have ahead.

Once I am at peace with the societal constructs that we fit into and then play a part in, then there is opportunity for learning.  Those who think learning is a joy ride are thinking of entertainment.  If we don't feel the emotional or psychological burn of our learning then it is something else we are doing.  The same goes with reflection, we either spin our wheels and reflect in an utterly empty manner, going around and around in circles - who we feel the transformation and when we look back, we can jot down the transition points of change.  There is both pain and pleasure in that but the compass point is doing what is right by our own heart.

That is why I like Mihaly's evidence based work on "Flow" - why it was the first book I ever read cover to cover on multiple occasions.  To do something for the curiosity of engaging it.  80% of whatever I have written online is no longer there, as sites closed down so went the content.  That does not mean I have lost 80% of my life!  This is what I have been engaging for a long time and each time I either regress or take two steps forward - a life journey is like that.  On the way I have written in other names like "Mark Zorro" - and the bits that remain - well, that is a picture of my brain when it was written.  It is a useful X-ray of life then and life now.

Between those words and these words something hopefully changed, whether this is a whole life is yet to be realized, but the moment I get told "successful personal branding" - that is a knife cutting me into three ways - when the joy of learning is to get to ONE, even if talked nearly a decade ago about getting to ZERO.

Mark Zorro - Fast Company 2008

https://www.fastcompany.com/user/mark-zorro