The Reboot: How to Get Unstuck
April 16, 2020
Sometimes my computer requires a reboot. With mounting frustration, I acknowledge that the device has slowed down and become stuck and broken. When I finally get to the point of rebooting my computer, I am often feeling downright frazzled. Sometimes, I have even made a call to the tech expert and I am at my wit’s end. And then… the reboot. The computer is fresh, new and upgraded.
Why did I need to go through all of the frustration and troubleshooting first? Why didn’t I simply wipe my computer clean and start over? Human nature… that is why. We are hardwired to problem solve. We believe that hard work pays off. We feel that if we just understand more, we can correct and fix anything.
You are probably beginning to realize that I am talking about more than computers here. Humans can reboot too. Humans have the ability to begin again. When we feel slowed down, stuck and broken, it is not always necessary to investigate the problem. We can begin fresh again. Now, unlike computers, we don’t come with a “return to factory settings” button. We come with something better… creativity.
We are collectively experiencing an unprecedented amount of human suffering right now. Living during a pandemic challenges us in ways that we have never before experienced. As a therapist, I have noticed incredible differences in how people are responding to being socially isolated and subjugated to their homes. The lack of control can be experienced as confining and can create an internal sense of sluggishness. Like a computer on the fritz, many people are experiencing the feeling of being stuck in their lives. The responses to this quandary vary greatly.
Some people are responding by looking at the slowness and their reaction to uncertainty and they are trying to figure out how to solve or change it. They feel that if only they can understand why this is happening to them, they will find a way out of it. Like being in quicksand, however, the ‘trying” is like fighting against the sand and moving further and further into the muck.
There are others who are modeling something quite different. These people are not fighting the quicksand. Instead, they are keeping very still in the quicksand and from that place of stillness, they can see more around them. They notice a branch to grab or a way to maneuver their body that will provide them with newfound freedom and release from the quicksand. In essence, creativity is used to reboot and problem solve. We can learn from these innovative individuals!
The specific approaches toward creativity vary greatly. Meditation, time in nature, writing, painting, and cooking, to name just a few, allow these innovators to experience an inner stillness. Inner stillness births imagination. The great visionaries are not immune to the brokenness that we all experience, they just know how to reboot and envision something new. Visionaries don’t spend their time fruitlessly examining what isn’t working. They innovate not from over-thinking but from another place altogether… imagination. As the playwright, George Bernard Shaw stated, “Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine, and at last, you create what you will.” And this is where the reboot happens. A human reboot is done by getting quiet and imagining another possibility.
Five years ago, I was working as a gynecologist. I attained a level of mastery in my daily work. I hungered for a new challenge. While there was plenty of room to learn and do more in medicine, my curiosity was more focused on the mind-body connection. At the same time, my work responsibilities began to change and felt constricting to me. I was at a place in my work life where I began experiencing less choice and more of a stuck feeling. My initial understanding of the situation was a feeling of powerlessness in my life that made me feel angry and anxious. I spent some time trying to figure out what had “gone wrong”. My morning ritual consists of meditation and journaling. In the quiet and stillness, a different path emerged for me. I began to visualize and imagine a new work life. I saw it in my mind’s eye with more and more detail and, at a certain point, I willed these visions into being. Now, I am a counselor, writer, and teacher. Essentially, I creatively rebooted when I felt most stuck!
Rebooting took courage for me. Changing my career challenged my sense of identity. Becoming a beginner and working on basic competency in a new field felt demoralizing at times. I experienced more failures than successes initially and unease became my status quo. My reboot, challenges included, transformed my life significantly.
We are in a time filled with painful change. Economic insecurity, illness, death, and relationship struggles take a toll on the human psyche. It is easy to think that a reboot only applies to those who are already faring well and not to those dealing with the most difficult aspects of our current condition. I don’t believe that this is the case. I believe that those of us struggling the most right now benefit most from these lessons from visionaries and innovators. We can all find paths to inner stillness and imagine something new and different for ourselves and our world.