I read, therefore I quote. I can’t help it. It’s what I do.
I was reading Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career
“Fortune favors the prepared mind.“
I immediately thought of Edna Mode’s version:
“Luck favors the prepared.”
(Anyone want to guess the movie? Hint: Don’t forget we are Disney freaks.)
Back to Herminia Ibarra’s thoughts about Pasteur:
“Pasteur was ready to make a discovery when a favorable opportunity presented itself because he . . . had primed himself through years of study and hard work . . .
. . . It is also no accident that the vaccination idea came to Pasteur right after his summer break. Having stepped back from his direct work on cholera, he was able to ssee his old problem in a new light. This is the famous “incubation” phenomenon, in which, “after ceasing to consciously work on a difficult problem, [artists and scientists] sometimes experience an apparant flash of illumination, during which a solution appears to them unexpectedly . . .
. . . Professional reinvention also requires a stepping back to obtain a new way of seeing what is. The full emotional and cognitive complexity of the change process can only be digested with moments of detachment and time for reflective observation. It the same way, time away from the everyday grind creates the “break frame” that allows people in transition to articulate intellectually what they already knew emotionally . . .
. . . It is hard for people to achieve the objectivity they need to question and change their daily routines while they are still actively immersed in them. Time-out periods help people make changes by providing a space for reflective observation. Stepping back makes room for insights we have been incubating but cannot yet articulate.”
In my thought processes, Ibarra led me to “Too Busy Not to Pray: Slowing Down to Be With God
“No one can become an authentic Christian on a steady diet of activity. Power comes out of stillness; strength comes out of solitude. Decisions that change the entire course of your life come out of the holy of holies, your times of stillness before God.”
I can’t take a vacation right now. But I can schedule some solitude on a regular basis. Maybe I won’t be able to keep the appointment every day, but I’ll take what I can get.
If you have a quote to share from something you’ve read recently, feel free to comment and/or include a link to your own “. . . therefore I quote” post. I’ll try to make this a regular Thursday theme. If you do join in and write your own “. . . therefore I quote” post, please include a link back here? Thanks!
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EXACTLY where I am right now! I took “off” September (with kids in school) to figure out what life is going to look like now that all four are there. I can’t just sit home. Jim wouldn’t like it. I wouldn’t like it. and quite frankly, I don’t think God wants me to, either!
But doing something new is SCARY.
Thanks for your quotes. And Edna ROCKS, DAH-LING.
I am able to find more solitude now that DD is grown and on her own. Seems like when there are kiddos around, little or otherwise, there’s always a “crisis” or something that needs to be taken care of by the maternal parent. Maybe it comes from always being in “Mom” mode. And even though J-Man is retired and always around, we have separate enough identities that I can usually get the alone time–but not the unoccupied time. And that is the difference, I think. Learning to be still. That’s going to take some work.
But oh, I am loving my time away from “nurse” mode right now.