When and how to leave the comfort of the established
One of the scariest feelings is that feeling that you’re on a path to nowhere. This terrifies me. I’ve felt this before — and I hope we all want to avoid it.
There is something to be said about commitment, but make the wrong commitments and you can be stubbornly clinging to the sides of a sinking ship. Yes, the ship is big. Yes, there is some safety in its majesty. But the lifeboat is what you need right now.
Life boats are also terrifying. When jumping off the sinking establishment, you don’t to find yourself in the very situation you’re attempting to escape. It’s tempting to cling to hope and magical thinking. Before you jump, you take your lucky rock — you pray.
Worse, what if an odd zealot runs up and says that not only is the ship sinking, what you’re witnessing is something like a worldwide apocalyptic rapture and there’s nothing ashore anyhow. This person wants you to accept Jesus into your heart before it’s too late.
We’re prone to magical thinking, but it is merely a perversion of our capacity for hopeful positivity, or a perversion of rational caution.
To jump off is to trade distant waves for close ones.
A life boat isn’t meant to be a stable solution to your uncertainty — you’ll eventually have to get off. The time to get onto a lifeboat is ASAP. The sooner you trade your comfort for survival, the better.