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Today I will introduce you to the idea that going and leaving, while related, are not the same thing. There is a reason why we use these words differently. I will also start to explain why leaving is harder than going - why even thinking about leaving can cause you not to go. But most of all, today’s post is about immediately re-framing your worldview so that you can better understand yourself and therefore more successfully approach the whole idea of taking your leave.
(Re-framing my worldview? Seriously? I am exhausted, pissed off, confused, afraid, and short on time/money/patience. On top of this, I am stuck in my ways. Good luck, Elizabeth…)
Yes, believe me, I know. I have been there. Still, I am going to ask you to look at yourself and the world a bit differently, because ultimately it will be this - your mindset - more than any job, career, city or even country – that you may most need to leave behind. So, take a breath, quiet your thoughts, look at this weird picture, and let’s get started.
Staghorn fungus we found in a puddle of slime mold, Belgium 2024
Leaving and going are not the same thing. So, leaving is the first part of motion from one place to another. Where going is focused on that exciting new space we soon plan to occupy, leaving is about preparing the current space for our exit - doing all the hard work of managing a successful exit while also (and this is the hardest part) still living in, relying on, and serving our current situation. Since our current environment, as much as we’d like to imagine it as static, is actually quite dynamic, “leaving” is not just about juggling priorities and tasks, it is juggling them while in motion, like a clown juggling on a unicycle. In traffic. When you are leaving, you are this kind of clown.
Going tends to relate to the good stuff. Leaving involves everything else. For example - if you're taking a vacation: going involves things like thanking a flight attendant for giving you a refreshing drink, then settling in to gaze out the window and think deep thoughts. Leaving, which you did prior to going, involved things like cursing at your spouse for not helping to pack, then settling in to fume out the taxi window and think angry thoughts. Here’s a little test: if you are saying “thank you” you are probably going. If you are saying “fuck you” you are probably leaving (unless, like me, you were born in NY, in which case this may be a term of endearment).
Returning to the whole clown thing for a moment - here in Europe I see juggling clowns frequently (and not just in the US news headlines har har, ok, not funny) because I live near an intersection where people juggle at the red light for coins. I remember seeing similar jugglers at the San Diego border in Mexico - skilled entertainers/migrants who exist in these in-between places, totally unsafe but smiling (we did see a guy the other day in full “sad clown” mime garb and makeup, begging at a seriously dangerous intersection here in Belgium - and considered how dead he’d be and by which method if he’d tried this in the US today). Even sitting behind locked doors and rolled up windows at the intersection, uncomfortable in the unexpected blurring of first and third worlds, the people in the nearby cars intently watch the soaring clubs of the jugglers - fixated on not the toss of the clubs, but the catch. Within each of their individual noise-cancelling car-envelopes, the crowd silently claps!
We love when jugglers catch things, don’t we? Because, you know, anyone can just toss stuff. But catch it? Wow! Successfully complete an intended action? Do it with style? Wowee! This is rare, takes real skill, and is generally appreciated, even at red lights.1
Going completes the intended action.
But leaving - courageous, daring, difficult, failure-likely, and unsafe - leaving starts it.
Because of this, though generally under-acknowledged, I find leaving to be the bravest component of transition, the most important (you can never catch something you don’t first toss), and the most difficult.
Juggling in traffic. Feels like a typical day in the lives of most of us.
Leaving is hard. I will take you through the neurological reasons why this is true in a later post - but for today let’s just acknowledge that this is true. If you’ve ever talked yourself out of leaving using weak or even strong arguments, if you’ve ever made a short list of things you’d need to do to leave and just announced “nope” after even trying to tackle the first steps, or if you’ve tried and failed, you know this to be true. Beyond going through the perfectly valid ChatGPT’able reasons for this, let me go right to the heart of the matter and start you moving on your mindset re-frame: this is not your fault. Or more specifically - this is half not your fault. Because, as your first step in reconsidering your worldview, I want you to see yourself not as one entity, but as two.
You are two.
My favorite way of explaining this is to go right to that other time-tested tool of clowns and comedians: slime.
Ok, not that stuff that Nickelodeon dumped on celebrity kids, or that Bill Murray or Will Smith have no doubt swallowed in their various movie-slimings. Also, not that expensive home-made stuff made of glue and contact lens fluid that your kids drop into the carpet where it stiffens into the hardest substance on earth - no, not that stuff. I am talking about the ones out in nature, that evolutionarily speaking we diverged from over a billion years ago: our ancient cousin, the remarkable, incredible slime mold.
A slime mold we found munching on a leaf, Belgium 2024
Slime molds are incredibly unique, bizarre organisms. They live literally everywhere, but especially in places like the forest near my home. They do the dirty work of decomposition, breaking down matter and helping to create beautiful soil for the next generation to grow in. They are slow and kind of gross, but if you watch a high-speed video of them hunting their prey, they are actually terrifying, in my opinion.2 Check it out:
Here is what is unique: slime molds are both individual and collective creatures. They are single celled amoebas, but they also come together to form one “plasmodium” - a living cytoplasmic entity filled with many nuclei. Basically, slime molds are individual cells that can form a megacell - and these megacells can do wildly intelligent things. A (relatively) famous experiment that exemplifies this fact was published in Science in 2010 when scientists placed oat flakes on a substrate in the same exact position of Tokyo subway stations. A slime mold was placed in the experiment, and it created protoplasmic tubes that connected the oat “stations” in a way that shockingly mirrored the existing subway system.3 Today, slime molds are used in biocomputing, neuromorphic computer chip design, and biomimetic AI - their memory and learning without a brain, and their collective intelligence make them not just interesting but thrilling to next gen engineers and entrepreneurs. Slime: it’s sexier than ever.
So - this relates to you because like slime molds - and other individual/collective entities like insect colonies, certain types of bacteria, and even jellyfish - humans are at once individuals and a part of a collective. Here’s how:
We show “emergent intelligence” - no one person (whether he thinks so or not) leads humanity yet we come together to achieve amazing accomplishments - constructive and destructive, yes, but un-arguably collective;
We cooperate to survive - even “preppers” rely on social infrastructure to get by;
We adapt and are resilient - humans have adapted across centuries, continents, cultures;
Our growth is non-linear - the steps we follow as a people are messy but somehow forward-directed toward resources;
We are deeply inter-dependent. Pandemic, anybody? Economy?
Nearly everything about you - including your desires, self-expression, emotions, and even thoughts - reflects the collective. Cognitive scientists and psychologists even have a name for this - co-thinking.
Co-thinking - that incredibly powerful influence on your individual mind - is at the very heart of your inability to leave. And you know the craziest part of this? Not only is co-thinking in large part responsible for keeping you stuck in place, the crazy thing is that someone is benefiting from this. Someone is making a profit. So developed is our human collective that some “cells” within it have figured out how to consume the largest levels of resources, dragging you along behind on their greedy quest.
Well, that sucks, doesn’t it?
This is the re-frame.
Rather than think of yourself, stuck there in the place you’d like to leave, as an individual who bears lots of shame and blame for not being able to get up and go, think of yourself as both an individual AND a collective. Not just a member of a collective - but you are also, in fact, the collective itself. You are a Human. You are also the great, brilliant blob called Humanity. Unlike you as a Human, who has dreams and ambitions, the collective you, Humanity, has other plans. This side of you - the collective side - joins your human self with billions of others (and all of the related social, economic, and environmental systems) and together, you hold the individual side of yourself in place. At the moment, unfortunately, enormous collective pressures (and those pesky resource hoarders) in your megablob might just prefer the individual human you to either stay where you are, or go where they send you.
What are these pressures? These include social elements like money, values, injustice, greed, and group fear designed to keep humanity together. These include entities with power who need you to remain predictable and extractive for resources: the pharmaceutical industry, the financial industry, the energy industry, the social media industry, and industries you don’t even know exist; algorithmic and AI power attached to all of these; and warring factions and political establishments. Finally, our stories of what is right and what is wrong - spoken, sung, written, filmed, posted, expressed in a million ways by everybody, every day. But really, collective organisms just behave this way, utilizing group sensemaking - in our case through our stories, in the case of slimes through their chemicals (and migrating birds and whales and monarchs, or synchronizing fireflies, or your swirling gut bacteria, or other kinds of collectives though other amazing “senses”) and rather than toss anger toward our collective biological attributes you can try to understand it.
Even better, you can try and embrace this amazing duality of you.
If you know what it is that you want to leave but just have not been able to do imagine how to do it; if you can imagine the benefits of finally going, but you just haven’t been able to face the difficulty of leaving - I want you to stop kicking yourself about it. There are forces - both internal and external to your troubled heart - that are keeping you in place. If you really have trouble kicking the habit of self-blame (again, likely taught to you by someone in the collective, like a parent), you can try another tack: self-forgiveness. This will be the topic of another post, not for today, but it is something you can do.
Again, I encourage you to look to nature: these individual/collective organisms naturally embrace and utilize complexity and impermanence while maintaining direction and purpose. I feel that these ecological systems really mirror our own complex lives - we are at once individuals, and we are also the collective. We are impermanent. We are in flux.
Keep this in mind: gelatinous cubes in D&D games may be pretty dangerous to push through, but in real life, slimes, though yucky, can be permeated safely. Over-set Jell-O in your refrigerator may be rubbery, bouncing you backward each time you poke it, but eventually, you can push through. Similarly, when facing the powerful co-thinking and pressures of the collective, remember that you are still also an individual. You can push through the group-mind and make your own transformational decisions that are best for you and those you love.
I feel that this re-framing of your worldview - this deep understanding that much more than your own perceived inadequacies are at play in your current situation - is incredibly important in drawing that line in the sand between who you are today, and who you hope to be in the future. For your part regarding these inadequacies, if you are certain about them, or if you cannot tell if they are real or imagined due to co-thinking, I recommend you seek self-forgiveness and acceptance. Regarding the co-thinking and the collective, I recommend you seek awareness and understanding.
Along with individual-you and collective-you, there is also past-you, current-you, and future-you to contend with…but all of this really just boils down to one person - you - moving along a time continuum in an environment full of others. One very special person, with lines that blur at the edges into the world around.
Handle this person with compassion, and with love. This is the first step.
Zuluaga, R. (2021, September 30). Top 10 – The most extraordinary shows at traffic lights. International Jugglers’ Association. https://www.juggle.org/top-10-the-most-extraordinary-shows-at-traffic-lights/
Tero, A., Takagi, S., Saigusa, T., Ito, K., Bebber, D. P., Fricker, M. D., Yumiki, K., Kobayashi, R., & Nakagaki, T. (2010). Rules for biologically inspired adaptive network design. Science, 327(5964), 439–442. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1177894
