Today is April 6 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “When is the last time you repotted yourself?”
American theologian Frederick Buechner wrote “To live is to experience all sorts of things. It would be a shame to experience them—these rich experiences of sadness and happiness and success and failure—and then have it just all vanish, like a dream when you wake up. Pay attention to your life.” One way to “pay attention to your life” is to “repot yourself.”
American writer John Gardner pushed people to think about “repotting” themselves every 10 to 15 years, throwing themselves into challenges that extract hidden strengths.
By repotting, people can recreate the sense of excitement and imagination experienced earlier in life.
It also has the wonderful side benefit of slowing down time.
Repotting makes experiences more vivid as each adventure is filled with firsts: the first few weeks on a new job, the first conversations with new neighbors in a new location and so on.
The newness of it all has the potential to heighten senses and deepen memories.
Sometimes people stumble upon an opportunity to repot themselves like Bennet Ifeakandu Omalu.
Bennet Ifeakandu Omalu is a Nigerian American forensic pathologist, who examined the brains of several deceased NFL players and was the first to publish findings of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive degenerative disease found in people with a history of repetitive brain trauma, in American football players.
Omalu is the central character portrayed by Will Smith in the 2015 film Concussion. Omalu needed to repot himself when he conducted an autopsy of former Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster in 2002 and found himself in completely new territory spending several years trying to convince the scientific community and the National Football League of the significance of his findings.
Sometimes people stumble upon an opportunity to repot themselves like Omalu.
He was working as the Allegheny County Coroner’s Office neuropathologist at the time he autopsied Webster and never intended to be at the center of one of the most important sports related issues of the 21st century.
Others, however, need to sustain the self-awareness to ask the question: ‘is it time to repot myself?’
When is the last time you repotted yourself?