The moat of low status is one of my favorite concepts, courtesy of my husband Sasha. The idea is that making changes in your life, especially when learning new skill sets, requires you to cross a moat of low status, a period of time where you are actually bad at the thing or fail to know things that are obvious to other people.
One of the fundamental choices that you face on Earth is the degree to which you’ll pursue deeper but riskier fulfillment or practice avoidance that exempts you from bad feelings but leaves you bereft of good ones.
You can never have a happy ending at the end of an unhappy journey; it just doesn’t work out that way. The way you’re feeling, along the way, is the way you’re continuing to pre-pave your journey, and it’s the way it’s going to continue to turn out until you do something about the way you are feeling.... See more
According to Kierkegaard, when we first find life boring, we seek new delights. He called this the aesthetic stage of life. Kierkegaard focused particularly on art and the erotic, but the category obviously refers to much more. This is the time, usually in early adulthood, when people are most open to new experiences and opportunities.
Writer Hanif Abdurraqib has said: “Find a living, breathing lineage to make yourself responsible to.” I love this encouragement to locate ourselves within an artistic, spiritual or cultural tradition and build loving, accountable connections with our compatriots.