Most of us can identify one or more turning points when we redefined who we are or at least who we want to be.
I think we get one free shot at this in our early 20's.
After that, it usually happens when we are confronted with some kind of crisis.
One of mine was when my house in LA burned to the ground and shortly thereafter I ended up in the hospital with a blood clot in my leg that could have traveled and killed me. I decided to leave behind a reasonably successful career in LA and move to London.
More recently, it was when I had open-heart surgery. That rethink wasn't as dramatic, it was more of a mindset switch to being less hard on myself.
What these have in common is that the usual situation stopped and the future was uncertain. That pretty well describes where we all are right now. Maybe that makes it a good time to take another look at where we are and where we want to be, and what we can do to bring ourselves closer to the latter.
I'm not clear yet what that means for me. Maybe for you it means you'll finally write that book or screenplay you've been intending to write or take a course to gain a new skill, or find another creative outlet.
It does seem that this is another time when a crisis also is an opportunity.
As Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote in Love in the Time of Cholera, "He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”
