Where Am I?

An important question to ask when trying to figure out your next steps.

Do what you can with what you’ve got where you are.

Are you feeling empowered after reading that? Ready to take action?

Me either.

Don't get me wrong. It's a great quote. One often (incorrectly) attributed to our 26th President, Teddy Roosevelt.¹ 

I love its intention — to motivate and inspire. To get us to consider our very real options and do something. Recognizing that no matter how dire the circumstances or limited the resources, there is always something you can do. Because at the end of the day, it's not about how much you do or the size of the action but the simple fact that you did something. 

It's a quote that popped up quite a bit in those early days of the pandemic, along with gems like "Never let a good crisis go to waste."² and stories about how the likes of Shakespeare and Newton were able to do amazing things during their times of quarantine. 

For me, the call to action to do anything felt more like a challenge than words of encouragement. Instead of inspiring me, it weighed me down. Especially during that time when it seemed like the world had turned itself upside down, and it felt like there was nothing that could be done to right it. 

Since I was living in an upside-down world, I decided to flip the quote on its head. 

Do What?

Like I said, I love the intention of this quote — a call to action. But what action? 

What can I do? What do I have? Where am I?

Turning this declarative statement into a series of questions helped me open up the lens to possibility.

Questions are a powerful tool we often use with others but a tool we can forget to use on ourselves. 

Our beautiful brains act like our own special supercomputers that have been collecting countless data points since the day we were born. As powerful as things like ChatGPT have become, it can't possibly search the database of our internal mind.³ 

Ask yourself a question, and your mind will go to work. It may not spit out immediate results; sometimes answers or options don't reveal themselves for days, weeks, or even longer, but your subconscious will be at work scanning both your internal and external landscapes in search of answers. 

And like entering a search query in Google, our minds might serve up multiple "pages" of options to consider. And that's okay because, in addition to more obvious answers, we might also find our brain spits out connected ideas that spark our creativity.

Where Am I?

The more specific the information you include in your search query, the more relevant the search results. 

So after asking, "What can I do?" the next logical data set to include might be taking an inventory of "what you've got," but before you can accurately do that, I think it's essential to determine where you are. Surprisingly, the trickiest of the three parts of this equation to figure out but one that can help more easily unlock answers to the other two.

What do you mean by "figure out where I am"? I'm [insert physical location]. 

Yes, "where" typically refers to a physical location. But it can also refer to where we are on our own personal timeline. 

So we need to ask ourselves - Are we present to the realities of our present? 

We're not always where we think we are.

We might be:

Stuck in the past

Are we stuck in the past with the routines, things, and people that are familiar to us? In those times when things felt more manageable, more straightforward, and seemed to go more smoothly? 

But was it really better in "the good old days," or have our memories softened the edges? The word that kept coming up for me was familiar, but I searched for a synonym since I've already used it. And 

I came across the word mundane. 

Think about that for a minute. If you find yourself stuck in the past, ask yourself if you want a mundane life.  

And even if that doesn't jar you into the present, consider that 2nd question. What do you have in the past? There's nothing but memories. 

Stuck in the future

Or maybe you're off in the future, where everything is as you imagine it could be. If the past is mundane, the future is exciting. Or as the song popular in the 80s goes: "The future's so bright I gotta wear shades." (And now I'm dating myself).

I'm not one to discourage the power of envisioning a bright future. In fact, I believe that it is necessary to know where we want to go. But it's not where we are yet, and that's where we can get tripped up.  

Because the future has yet to be written, it's what we're writing right now.  

It's what we hope it to be. Dream it to be. But that's what it is — hopes and dreams. You can't know what you'll have available to you in the future. 

And if you don't know what you'll have, how can you possibly figure out what you can do? What steps you can take? 

Stuck in the land of should of

There's another point in time where we can get stuck - it's what I've started to call the "land of should of." ⁴

It's not exactly the past, though it sprang from a time in the past, and it's not exactly the future either. 

It's an alternative reality that only exists in our minds. 

The land of should of is that place you expected to be by now and should have if past plans had gone to plan. 

It can be fun to imagine what would happen (or what would have happened) had we made different choices. My fellow Gen Xers might remember the Choose Your Own Adventure storybooks popular in the 80s and early 90s, where you would get to the end of a chapter and decide between options for where to go next. And if you're like me, you probably went back and started the book over, making different choices to see what would have happened if only…

Movies like Sliding Doors and About Time play out similar structures, showing two or more versions of a character's timeline. 

In these books and movies, we, as the reader or viewer, get to see the pros and cons of each timeline play out. We know the benefits and tradeoffs — what is and isn't available to each character — usually coming to the conclusion that neither outcome is objectively better or worse, just different.

Our minds aren't quite as objective. When we are in the land of should of we tend to imagine an idealized version of what this alternate reality would have been if only. Should be, if only….

I wonder if this isn't where we all find ourselves more often than not. That place where a better choice, a different path, would have made our lives so much better than they are now. Except would they be? What wouldn't we have? Who wouldn't we have in our lives if we had taken that path?

We can't know. This location is only a figment of our imagination. There's nothing to hold on to here.

What Is

So….Where are you? 

Are you stuck in what was, what could be, what should have been?

If you find yourself in any of those places where you are not is in what is. 

But reality has a way of making itself known, and the longer we try to ignore it, the more painful it is to come to terms with.  

The dissonance between what is and what was, could be, or should be can be so stark that we either flail against it or it stops us in our tracks. 

Either way, we're stuck in a mental limbo, and we don't move forward. But the world does. 

They say ignorance is bliss, but sometimes it's a hell of our own making. 

Only once you look around and come to grips with where you actually are and what you actually have can you move forward and do something. 

A strange thing happens when we look at what is and come to terms with reality — when we finally go in and look at our bank balance or that credit card statement, a struggling relationship, a job, or a role that doesn't feel like the right fit.

We're scared we'll only see what's not working, but it's from this place that we can see what is working. We can look around and see what we do have.  

And that allows us to open up to what is possible. Not hopes, not dreams, but very real steps we can take to create a new reality, one of our choice, one of our own making. 

So, when you find yourself feeling stuck, ask yourself these three questions:

Where am I? 

What do I have? 

What can I do?

Remember to take some time with that first question.  

Then, after assessing the landscape, go ahead and do what you can, with what you've got, from where you are. 

Here’s a bonus question for you:

1. While President Roosevelt did say this, he was quoting a friend named Squire Bill Widener who he credits in his autobiography.

2. This quote about the benefits of a crisis (bleh) has been attributed to a number of people including Winston Churchill. Since I’m not a big fan of the quote and would like to not live through another time that requires it being said quite so often I decided not to spend my time or energy deep diving on its origin.

3. Never say never — earlier this month Elon Musk announced that his startup, Neuralink, has successfully implanted a microchip into a human brain. Let’s file this under things I wish I didn’t know.

4.

Paul Millerd

came up with a much better name for this place in his recent post, Escape Shouldlandia | #255.