When a firefighter is told to drop his firefighting tools, he is told to forget he is a firefighter.*
Norman Maclean

When you are looking for a vocation, you are looking for a daemon. … You are trying to find that tension or problem that arouses great waves of moral, spiritual, and relational energy.**
David Brooks

Firefighters who couldn’t let go of their tools to save themselves and engineers who couldn’t let go of their data and allowed Challenger to launch are some of the stories told by David Epstein as he considers how it is essential to drop our familiar tools when working in complexity, what he calls wicked problems.

They highlight for us how, if we are to take hold of an adjacent possibility for our lives, we will need to let go of the familiar.

By all means, give yourself the chance to mourn your loss, then move on.

*Norman Maclean, quoted in David Epstein’s Range;
**From David Brooks’ The Second Mountain.