Don't escape, exapt. | Wise Wednesdays

Travelling to India and moving to an ashram is one of the most enduring fantasies available to a weary Western mind. It was strong in the 60s and it’s still alive now, with variations on the theme. The pull of transcending the world and finding eternal bliss tugs on our spiritual imagination.

This dilemma can also mask itself as chronic self-doubt: perhaps there’s greener grass somewhere else, or perhaps I’m simply not adequate enough to reach it.

But often what we’re seeking through escape is a sense of excitement, or a rediscovery of aliveness, wonder, freedom, and creativity. And the good news is that these are available to us innately if we’re willing to…exapt.

Exaptation is when a trait that evolved for one purpose is recruited for another. It’s evolution’s form of repurposing, where a new use emerges for a pre-existing form and gradually unfolds a whole new shape of existence.

What does this look like? Dinosaurs developed feathers long before some of their descendants eventually used them for flight. One scientific story goes that, one day, a feathered dinosaur escaping at speed was lifted off the ground and flight was born. 

A modern example: mathematical skills (pattern recognition, abstraction, logical reasoning) were useful to my work in statistics and epidemiology and later for seeing psychological patterns and helping people break out of them. But mathematical skills didn’t evolve for either of those things. 

[Reconstruction of a Dancing Dragon that would have lived 120 million years ago.] 

So what do ashrams and dinosaurs have in common, apart from being ancient?

Well, we don’t necessarily need to ‘escape’ our lives to experience something new. Sometimes what’s already present in our lives can be recruited and used in ways we hadn’t anticipated - letting us take flight.

A creative streak is ignited as a passion for design. The passion fuels the entrepreneurialism to turn it into a source of income. This source of income allows a more flexible and energising lifestyle which itself fuels more creativity. And so a new life experience emerges. Just this month a past executive client went through this exact journey, turning a redundancy into a pivot. And this can happen while in role too, if you use your salary (or pension) as a Life Reconfiguration Grant - your own Exaptation Fund.

A deviation from routine and exposure to new environments (whether forced or planned) changes the variables in your life and reveals new solutions to the meaning equation. It increases the probability that you will see a new path that you may have faintly sensed but not yet fully conceived because it was hidden in the forest of familiarity.

In uncertainty, let go of expectations and play with exaptation.

In exaptation,

Amina