
The Self wishes to create to evolve. The ego likes things just the way they are.*
(Eckhart Tolle)
For most of us, though, changing our behaviours is driven by our desire to fit in (people like us do things like this) and our perception of our status (affiliation and dominance). Since both these forces often push us to stay as we are, it take tension to change them.**
(Seth Godin)
Seth Godin is touching upon the two basic myths Joseph Campbell believes we all need for our lives: a personal myth and a social one.
Who am I? and What is my contribution?
If we do not shape our own they will be provided for us.
This experience of finding our own can be unsettling and for this reason we avoid it, but it doesn’t take as much as we fear to find the necessary tension to draw something new out.
Once identified, each new day provides opportunity to explore and discover:
People wish to be settled; only as far as they are prepared to be unsettled is there any hope for them.^
(*From Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth.)
(**From Seth Godin’s This is Marketing.)
(Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Ursula K. Le Guin on Art, Storytelling and the Power of language to Transform and Redeem.)