detecting the flow
Observing my situation, I oscillated between unease and anxiety. Unease at the present reality; anxiety at the prospect of leaving this reality. In observing and oscillating, two questions would resound: To stay or not to stay in the unease of the established? To go or not to go into the anxiety of the unknown?
I immersed myself into the present reality and into the reality evoked by the insight in order to grasp the emotional responses and energy flows.
When I was at work I felt an unusual lack of drive – as if a floodgate had been closed. The activity to which I had devoted myself out of conviction and with passion, had become a duty. The inanimate work demanded more and more energy, but no longer gave any energy back. I felt, that had been living from my reserves – from the remembrances of a joyful past.
Fortunately, in the oscillation between unease and fear, I didn’t only experience a lack of drive and stagnation. When I freed the space to devote myself to the questions that were not new but had gained urgency, I felt alive and nourished despite the fear and the unease I was experiencing.
The vital flow had taken an unexpected and unknown course. I was astonished, confused and frightened, since the flow was in no way related to profession and earning, but solely supported by an inner drive.
The drive was alimented by a need I knew but which I had never experienced in this intensity and persistence before, and which I considered as a personal and private matter.
For a long time I tried to reopen the floodgate and to reinvigorate my work with the drive I knew, but without closing the floodgate that was open. The sense of responsibility, loyalty, demands on myself, beautiful memories, friendships, fears and hopes pushed me to persist.
But the splitting of the flow would not succeed. Life was relentless and demanded a decision: Either you abandon the security and the action without vital flow or you leave the vital flow without body and action.
Once again I was caught in a field of tension, now of conflicting anxieties: leaving leads to existential precarity, I fear indigence, suffering, illness and death. Staying leads to a lack of energy, I fear exhaustion, suffering, illness and death. It was clear, you cannot escape anguish.
I petrified.