Acatalepsy - the impossibility of arriving at full comprehension. The Story Your life took years in the making. Now you have to move cities and start all over. No matter how many lives you have they won't be enough. |
Not just are you willing to make effort because you don’t want to waste your time, but you already feel "late" in life and this will take you back a few more years. How long does this delay keep you from gaining the freedom that success would bring you?
Being a multicultural was a shortcut to becoming worldly. Maybe your family had a sponsor or two in the transition of moving your family overseas and back. Your life was always on the move, and you experienced the better half of life early on in life.
Yet now that you are independent, you are unable to celebrate Thanksgiving with all your family and friends and be back again to meet the new in-laws for Christmas in the same year. That doesn’t include Chinese New Year with dumplings and then be on a plane back to watch the cherry blossoms. You don't have the same resources or time as you did then.
You got your MBA overseas to take a break from it all, and when you returned to your country you were still treated like a 4th year recruit and it's like you have to pay your dues in this culture until they one day accept the ways of the global education. Ways in one culture don't translate in the other and you are the one paying the high price of having to live up to both and barely able to keep them going.
Now you are forgetting your first culture and totally soaked in the local trends. Looking back is like seeing an alternative life which you never lived and it strikes you how less complicated it would have been to have not moved yet then all the exciting things you’ve seen since then would have remained undiscovered.
With every choice came a compromise - you won't return this year but another and then it started to surmount to nearly a decade. Nothing was really decided about it and everything was constantly temporary. Pushed back for another year, or two, or three, until you realized that your friends back home were all getting married and having kids while you're still vying for that promotion.
The Revelation
While you spent time living up to certain values in one culture, they may not translate in the new culture. How can you acquire new ways of being in the new culture while also staying close to what means most to you? There is no beginning and no end in the growth of a human being. We start as a clean slate and are reborn throughout life as we go through our trials and triumphs. The greatest achievements gained until now are also exceeded by you after time. The circle of life proves to us that there is no end. Are you in the beginning, the middle, or the end of your journey? Are you really behind or are you ahead? You can pick up from whereever you are, whenever you want.
If we were expected to be as if you lived your whole life in one place, being able to perform well at a certain domain only seen from one particular view point, this limits you to only a certain style of performance.
What you believe in will be limited by what you know. That can both strengthen and impede you. It will drive you in the direction where there will be the most growth for your soul and there is no promise of the outcome. An outcome that can only be met by living through the decision.
Do you stretch your horizons or put yourself on a tightrope to master the details of one path? Or do you stop this story now to start writing a new one?