You’ve got to think about big things while you’re doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.

— Alvin Toffler

A rule (or boundary) turns a theoretical or philosophical stance into a clearly defined behavior: Do this, and your behaviors align with your belief. Congruence. 

Do that, and you miss it. Conflict. 

Internal conflict doesn't feel good.

Break dumb rules. Break arbitrary small rules (or don’t). Break rules that exist only to create convenience for one group of people. Break rules that are immoral even if they’re not illegal. Whenever you can, break rules that exist only to uphold a system. It’s important.

Don’t break the rules that define who you are…

…Unless that’s not who you want to be anymore. 

Break all the rules that define who you are if you didn’t choose them, don’t want them, or don’t like how they fit anymore.

Break ‘em all the time. Break them into pieces. Be prepared for a breakdown of your existing self too, since that’s what you’re doing.  Reconfiguring yourself is tough work and you’ll need to have naps and sometimes a small tantrum. 

Is there a rule in your heart that says you should feel the pain and bear the responsibility of things outside your control?

This is a good rule to break.

Break it now. Try it. Go ahead. Tough, huh? Feelings don’t cooperate with commands. They follow patterns, well-worn grooves. You have to keep at it for a while. You have to give yourself a new mantra and repeat it. You have to let your feelings be whatever they are and say, Okay that’s fine, yes, I hear you, ouch it sure does hurt! And then carry on about your business and remind yourself that feeling bad doesn’t change reality, so it’s okay to pay less attention to those bad feelings. Maybe over time they get quieter. Try it out, see what happens.

I am against the pattern we seem to have developed as an intelligent but oh so emotional people of feeling bad as a way of bearing responsibility. 

I am against it because it’s nonsense. Nothing changes in the world because I feel bad about it. The bomb doesn’t reroute into an uninhabited wasteland. The layoffs don’t reverse. The cancer doesn’t curl up and wither away. The bullet doesn’t retreat into the gun. 

So this is a dumb rule and one worth breaking. Feeling bad about bad things doesn’t make you a good person. But it does drain your energy so there’s not much left for action. 

That’s interesting, isn’t it? 

Maybe there’s a better rule to put in place. 

Once you have determined the spiritual principles you wish to exemplify, abide by these rules as if they were laws.

— Epictetus

I’m in school¹ again. 

I’m going back to school because my work, my entire career, for my entire adult life, has been writing things for the Internet. That’s going away, at least as a livable career option. By livable, I mean an option I can live with. 

When I started writing for the Internet, early 2000s, I could find decent paying gigs on Craigslist. A quarter a word wasn’t uncommon. It wasn’t easy — I spent a lot of time searching and researching and answering inane qualifiers and writing samples for zero money. So we’re not talking about a pot of gold at the end of the freelance writing rainbow. But you could gather enough gold thru your efforts to make it worthwhile. 

I wasn’t pleased when SEO became a thing I had to do to keep working. I am less pleased with AI. I have been lucky and somewhat insulated for the last year or two but things change, and I can see the trend. I still have a job with a great team but already the work is shifting in a direction I do not want to go. So, I am not going. I am making a different choice. I am choosing a different direction. I am goosing it up, baby. 

I have started over several times in my life. New places, new communities, new jobs, new scenarios, new perspectives. I feel, at this point, that I have lived a few complete different lifetimes already. That’s kinda cool, even if it’s not always by choice. 

Starting over requires a lot of energy but it also a relief. Every time I start over I establish a new baseline. I get to reset. I get to peruse my space, both exterior and interior, and declutter: Throw out old junk, worn-out habits, misplaced loyalties, dusty grievances, faded beliefs. Starting over, at any scale, always means leaving things behind. You do some grieving, releasing, mud-scraping. You definitely light up the bullshit cabinet (there’s no better time really). Hopefully you also do a lot of self care.

Then you take the next step. And the next. Along the way you decide who you get to be now. 

1. Nursing school. Doing prereqs now and working weekend shift as a patient tech so I can learn hands-on too.