HUFFINGTON
02.23.14
THRIVE
all going to veer away from that
place again and again and again.
That’s the nature of life. In fact, we
may be off course more often than
we are on course. The question is
how quickly can we get back to that
centered place of wisdom, harmony, and strength. It’s in this sacred
place that life is transformed from
struggle to grace, and we are suddenly filled with trust, whatever
our obstacles, challenges, or disappointments. As Steve Jobs said in
his now legendary commencement
address at Stanford, “You can’t
connect the dots looking forward;
you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust
that the dots will somehow connect
in your future. You have to trust in
something—your gut, destiny, life,
karma, whatever. This approach
has never let me down, and it has
made all the difference in my life.”
There is a purpose to our lives,
even if it is sometimes hidden from
us, and even if the biggest turning
points and heartbreaks only make
sense as we look back, rather than
as we are experiencing them. So
we might as well live life as if—as
the poet Rumi put it—everything is
rigged in our favor.
But our ability to regularly get
back to this place of wisdom—like
so many other abilities—depends
on how much we practice and how
important we make it in our lives.
And burnout makes it much harder
to tap into our wisdom. In an op-ed
in The New York Times, Erin Callan, former chief financial officer
of Lehman Brothers, who left the
firm a few months before it went
bankrupt, wrote about the lessons she learned about experiencing burnout: “Work always came
first, before