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Let Go of Your Life Plans: Be Willing to Change Course, with Judith Light, Actress and Activist
Move away from your “nevers”
I had a very definitive structured idea about the way that my career should go, how it should be. I was going to do theater, and I was going to do feature films. And that was it. There wasn’t anything outside of those parameters or outside of that box. And when those things weren’t happening, I started to think, wait a minute. What’s happening? This isn’t the plan. This isn’t the way things are supposed to be. I was at the moment of what I call sort of an existential crisis in my life combined with a tantrum of a spoiled brat.
What I started to do was kind of find a way to work my way out of that. And how I was doing it–the way I was thinking about it was that, oh, OK, I’ll go into another field. I’ll do something different. Because I knew that I wanted to do something in the world that I would be able to find a way to make a difference. And I wasn’t clear how to do that. And so what came up at that particular point in time was an understudy on a soap opera, which I swore that I would never do. It was something I literally had said to my parents: “I’m never going to do a soap opera. I am never going to do a sitcom. I am never going to move to California.” So I had all these nevers. Of course, all of them have come to pass.
And I was very humbled by the fact that when I went to the soap opera for the day to work just as an understudy, just to be there, which I had never heard of before, but this gal was not well. And so they were worried she wouldn’t be able to go on, and they needed somebody to be standing by. And I watched how hard everybody was working. And I watched how the process happened and how an hour of programming got produced every single day. And I had a whole new vision of a world that I had really had disdain for. I had to move away from all of those nevers in order to be open to what was being presented to me and looking at what was being presented to me rather than thinking about or making up what I thought should happen. All of a sudden the world opened up to me in a way that I had never expected. They ended up hiring me for the job to take over for this gal. And all of a sudden I saw the world through new eyes.
Find your flexibility
The willingness to change course is vital in anyone’s chosen profession, anyone’s life, anyone’s business. I find the sense of getting stuck in something that is an old idea or an old thought or a picture from the past doesn’t really serve me, you, one as you move forward in the world. Things are ever evolving. There is a kind of fluidity to life that if you dig your heels in and you don’t ever evolve or change or grow or move, you’re stuck in the past in some way.
Now, this is paradoxical because one has to have a vision, a commitment to something. But that’s the difference between content and context. In content, it’s like you can have a glass of water or soda or flowers or any one of a number of things as its content. But the context stays the same. The context, the container, is, will I grow? Will I be a person who will live this life growing, shifting, transforming, being a person of the world, being of service to people in the world? If you have a context like that, I think there’s a kind of flexibility. So then the content, whatever the content is or however it changes, you’re still moving forward with this powerful context and vision in the world.
Get centered. Get grounded. Be onto yourself about the way you’re operating in the world. If you are operating from a place of consciousness, of being awake to what you do, not to criticize yourself or blame yourself, but to take ownership of all of who you are in all of your complexity, all of a sudden you will be relating differently. You will have a different context.