My friend’s phone died. We were on a holiday to Spain and her main tool for keeping in touch with those at home would not recharge. We checked the power source, we tried changing cables and adaptors. Nothing. Her phone would not recharge.
What to do?
Well, try rebooting.
It worked. The phone just needed to be turned off completely and re-set to its original settings.
And I thought: What a great metaphor for life!
Most of us are pretty good (usually) at recharging our batteries so that we can keep getting on with life. Try and get enough sleep, some exercise, reasonable diet… It’s just enough to keep us going.
But sometimes life throws us a curve ball. Something – a death of a loved one, an illness, job loss or a relationship breakdown – comes at us out of the blue and strikes us down. Or sometimes the accumulation of little things can take its toll and we find that simply recharging is no longer enough.
There are times in life where we find that we just can’t go on. This can happen in varying degrees – from simply not being able to get up and go to a job we hate, all the way through to having a complete breakdown and being unable to function in any domain of our lives.
It’s at these times that we need a reboot. It may be a self-selected reboot, for example, in the case of quitting a job and taking time out to work out what we’d love to do in life, or it may be an enforced reboot, where we require medication and psychiatric support.
I like to think of a reboot as a gift. It’s an incredible opportunity to strip away all the gunk that clogs us up and makes living so hard. It’s an opportunity to cut away all that is not us in order to bring to light who we truly are, to be able to reveal our true selves, our true nature and our true purpose.
Michelangelo reportedly said:
In every block of marble I see a statue… I only have to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it.
I love that quote. It reminds me that when I find that simply recharging my batteries is no longer enough, I need to go deeper. I need to get to my original settings. It’s time to hew away those things in life that are not me, that are not aligned to my values and that are not serving me. It’s at those times that I get back to my true nature and true purpose.
