Reconnecting

Meaning in your life can be measured by how often you say to yourself that you're stuck in a rut. No one who is living a life that feels meaningful is going to say that. Rather, it's a sign from yourself to yourself, that you want to change your life somehow.

You know what a rut is. It's a long deep track that was created by the wheels of vehicles. The more vehicles travel down the road, the harder it is to get out of the rut. A rut is also a metaphor for habits that are dull, boring, and routine. This often happens in adult life. You become responsible. You take on responsibilities to take care of your family, to work at your job, to pay your bills, to fix meals, clean the house, and mow the lawn. The list of to-dos can go on and on. Whatever your own list is, the routine itself becomes a rut that grows deeper and deeper as you lose touch with what you really want to do with your life.

More than any other characteristic, when you feel stuck in the rut of your life, you have lost connection with who you used to be and who you wanted to become. If you keep telling yourself that you are stuck in a rut, you have lost your sense of meaning in how you are living your life. If you have lost connection and lost meaning, you have also lost self-esteem about who you are.

Courage to Get Out of the Rut

Alan Cohen says this about what it takes to get out of a rut:

It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.

My book, How to Get Out of The True Self Trap: The Life-Changing Secret of Heroic Stories,  challenges the assumptions of self-help work that treats you as a problem to be solved. This tendency is deeply rooted in religious and psychotherapeutic beliefs about fixing what is wrong with you. In contrast, heroic stories are about ordinary people doing extraordinary actions in response to some outer challenge. In the process, they discover that they are capable of far more than the imagined.

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