Poke, push in, and pop out
The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will, you know if you push in, something will pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it. That’s maybe the most important thing. It’s to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.…
Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.
Steve Jobs
Jobs invites us to change life and make it better. We ask ourselves, have we established routines in our lives, in our work, only to repeat them every day? Do we leave work and go home thinking that when we return tomorrow we will rely on what we always do?
Or have we taken initiative, poking our day, pushing in what we choose to bring to our job or wherever we are, and watching it pop out. Every day anew where we “embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.”
We can be activators of cogitating, creativity, discovery, disclosure, eurekas, epiphanies. We immerse ourselves into openings, pathways into unknowns, and acquire new insights to bring life alive. In Job’s words, “Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.” How delightful it would be if we chose anew every day!
Teachers having fixed schedules for each day, for each year, its rhythm can lure them into routines they need only to fulfill. And all of us, too, may have developed habitual patterns in our work. Jobs offers us to “shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.” Seize each day. Be creative in your jobs (no pun intended), in your life and by implication, do not replicate what others––or you––have done.
Taking steps to poke and push in and “pop out the other side,” you become the person that is in you, the only one of you who came into this world.
