🌿 A poem a day keeps the blues away… 

WILD GEESE—or when feeling stuck is part of the process 🌿

🌻 (…) Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things. 🌻

—Mary Oliver

🌱 Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

If you’re thinking about a career change or are in the middle of one, you may recognise this particular kind of despair.

• The despair of feeling stuck in a hamster wheel and seeing no way out.
• The despair of being in a fog, not knowing where to go next.
• The despair of looking for a job in an unforgiving market, with no end in sight.
• The despair of being 40 or 50 and still not knowing what you want to be when you grow up.

It can feel as though your life has stopped moving.
As though everyone else is progressing, while you’re running hard just to remain in the same place.

Movement beneath the surface

But Oliver’s repeated “Meanwhile” invites a different way of looking at that stuckness: Even when we think we’re stuck, there’s movement.

Just because movement is not visible to us doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

A career transition can be like that.

On the outside, it may look as though nothing is changing.

• You may still be in the same job,
• going to the same meetings to have the same old conversations,
• sending the same applications,
• having the same doubts,
• waking up with the same questions.

But underneath, Oliver tells us:

🌱 The world goes on

—and something is always shifting.

• An old idea of success may be loosening.
• Your definition of who you are, and what you want, may be shifting.

This void you find yourself in right now is a fertile void: the space in which new life can finally form.

The chrysalis

Chrysalises have always fascinated me. In fact, they’ve become a metaphor for how I understand career and life transitions:

Transitions are the chrysalis from which new life can form.

As a child, I used to wonder what was happening to the caterpillar inside. After all:

• It’s just there.
• It doesn’t move.
• It doesn’t eat.
• Is it aware that its body is reorganising itself inside its shell?
• Is it aware that it’s using stored energy to break down and rebuild much of its caterpillar body into something utterly new?

This biological process is called “metamorphosis” because the transformation is so complete that what emerges is unrecognisable from what came before.

The same can happen during a career or life transition.

That is why the line:

🌱 the world offers itself to your imagination

feels like the poem’s punchline.

Your transition is not about what you already know. It’s about what might be possible, while trusting that something may still be making its way towards you.

When we’re exhausted, disappointed or afraid, we often make decisions only on the evidence in front of us.

• The job market says no.
  Our experience is too specific or too broad.
  Our age feels like a disadvantage.

Our confidence has been worn down by rejection. And the fog keeps so much out of sight.

But if we allow ourselves to welcome the fog and the void as fertile ground for metamorphosis, the waiting and the apparent lack of movement become more bearable.

And we may become able to consider an alternative view:

☀️ What if I’m not behind, but in the middle of becoming?

Harsh and exciting

The call of the wild geese is

🌱 harsh and exciting.

Harsh—because transformation is rarely easy or comfortable. It’s frustrating, risky, scary and full of uncertainty.

Exciting—because every transition carries the possibility of becoming something new.

Like the caterpillar, we may not yet be able to see what is taking shape. But something is happening inside the apparent stillness of the chrysalis.

📌 So, if you’re feeling stuck in your career or life in general, remember:

the absence of visible movement is not proof that nothing is changing or moving.

You’re standing in the midst of your own fertile void.

So, take heart (and if you can: rejoice), for metamorphosis is in the making.

🦋 Happy Sunday everyone! 🦋

With love,

Dina 🫶🏽

Resources:

• Read Mary Oliver’s full poem “Wild Geese” here: https://allpoetry.com/poem/15374223-Wild-geese-by-Mary-J-Oliver
• This week’s song is an instrumental piece by Philip Glass called METAMORPHOSIS (1988). It’s 33 minutes long, and its repetitive, slowly shifting music evokes the spirit of the poem and this week’s reflections. I’d even encourage you to play it while you’re reading this blog post.

🌿 A poem a day keeps the blues away… 

THE WAITING—or when your next career chapter is not ready to introduce itself yet 🌿

🌻

I was waiting for something
to arrive. I didn’t know what.
Something buoyed, something
sun knocked. I placed my palms
up, little pads of butter, expecting.
All day, nothing. Longer than
that. My hair grew, fell out,
grew. Outside my window, I felt
the flick of a tail in September
wind. A bobcat sauntered across
the grass before me, the black tip
of its tail a pencil I’d like to sharpen.
I immediately hushed, crouched,
became a crumpled shock of
joy to see something this wild,
not myself. (…) Sometimes
what comes to us, we never called
for. (…)
It was as if a bank vault had
opened and I was just standing
there, stealing nothing.

🌻

— Jane Wong, The Waiting
Copyright © 2021 by Jane Wong. Originally published in Poem-a-Day by the Academy of American Poets.

🪴 If you’re thinking about a career change, you may recognise this particular kind of waiting.

You may be doing all the right things: reflecting, strategising, updating your CV, scanning job ads, having conversations, applying—and still your next step, that ever-elusive job, remains out of sight.

This “in-between” can be frustrating. It has the awkwardness of standing at a station, ready to leave things behind, but unsure which platform to get to—or whether a train will ever arrive to take you where you want to go.

But not all movement is visible.

Wong’s bobcat may have seemed to arrive from nowhere—it didn’t.

While she had been waiting for something to arrive—a waiting that felt like months and years judging by her hair—the bobcat had been on its journey, only to appear at the exact moment she least expected.

Image by Gabriele Brancati on pexels

We spend much of our lives chasing targets:
a target education, a target weight, a target job title, a target life.

But life has its own way of unfolding, too.

And sometimes, what it offers us is not exactly what we had planned—but something we had not yet imagined. Something that makes us feel as though we’re standing in front of an open bank vault, stealing nothing—because it has been given to us freely.

Our time has finally come.

📌 So, if this is you—waiting for something to arrive—remember:

You don’t have to force the whole next chapter into view today.

Something is always on the move, even when it feels as though you’re standing still.

🦋 Happy Sunday everyone! 🦋

With love,

Dina 🫶🏽

Resources:

• Read Wong’s full poem here:  https://poets.org/poem/waiting
• This week’s song : The Waiting by Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers. Because, yes: sometimes “the waiting is the hardest part”. But “every day also brings another little yard”.

🌿 A poem a day keeps the blues away… 

“Harlem”—or What happens to a dream deferred? 🌿

🌻 What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat
Or crust and sugar over—
Like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
Like a heavy load.

Or does it explode? 🌻

— Langston Hughes (1901-1967)

🪴 Langston Hughes was one of the most powerful voices of the Harlem Renaissance—a poet, a civil rights writer, and a master of saying everything that needs to be said in as few words as possible. This poem is a masterclass in that.

📌 As we explore it together, I invite you to hold Hughes’ question on a personal level:

What happens to YOUR dream deferred?

🪴Hughes opens with a simple question: what happens to a dream that is postponed?

He then offers a series of images, each one a possible fate for the delayed pursuit of one’s hopes and dreams.

🌱 Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?—something once full of juice and life, shrivelled by neglect and heat.

And yet, even a raisin, if not discarded or considered “dead”, can still be consumed. And when we do, its sweetness is ten times stronger than a grape’s… the sweetness of a promise finally fulfilled—even if at an advanced age.

🌱 Or fester like a sore—and then run?—in this scenario, the dream becomes infected, festering until it finally breaks open.

I wonder if this is what happens when we start resenting ourselves—and maybe even our loved ones—for never having tried.

And yet, even here, there is a sense of relief in that image. The intense pain relief when the sore finally runs, because that’s when healing can finally begin. It might leave a scar, sure, but also the promise of a new beginning.

🌱 Does it stink like rotten meat?—decay. Something that was once nourishing, now putrid.

I initially imagined the sad sight of what once was a juicy steak—which once was a living cow—butchered to fill a man’s hunger only to be left out for so long—untouched, unconsumed, sacrificed for nothing.

And then I wondered: what if a stinking dream is like a crying baby—trying to get our attention in the only way it can: by stinking up the place? Demanding attention.

🌱 Or crust and sugar over—like a syrupy sweet?— a dream that hardens and crusts over, and while it may still look sweet on the outside, it’s probably now too hard to consume or enjoy.

Maybe it gets relegated to a shelf instead—like an artefact in a museum, too precious to throw away, yet too old for consumption. Neither dead nor alive. Waiting…

🌱 Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.—the accumulated weight of carrying something unrealised, day after day.

Given my gender and age, the first image that came to mind was that of an old woman’s saggy breasts—once perky and firm, now thin and shriveled, pulling further and further down towards gravity, day after day.

The memory of what once was, and could have still been, but no longer is.

🌱 Or does it explode?—what a genius way to end this poem. After all the domestic images of drying and sagging and festering, we are reminded that a deferred dream can also be a ticking Bomb.

Its unrealized energy and potential become, at some point, too much to contain and the only way left is an outward forceful expression.

Sometimes you can only defer a dream for so long before something gives.

A seed of hope

🪴 Given its title “Harlem”, it’s safe to assume Hughes was referring to the African American dreams of equality, dignity, and freedom that had been systematically deferred by racism, segregation, and broken promises.

And yet, as with any great poem, it works equally well on a personal level.

Any one of us who has ever postponed something important—a career change, a creative ambition, a relationship—will smell the stink and feel the heavy load.

But the poem also holds seeds of hope.
For a dream deferred is neither dead nor forgotten.

In every one of Hughes’ images, the dream is simply changing form, trying to grab our attention, hoping to be noticed—so that we can finally pick it up and decide: do we toss it away for good, or do we breathe life into it?

📌 What will you be choosing today?

🦋 Happy weekend everyone! 🦋

With love,
Dina 🫶🏽

PS: All em dashes are my own 😉.

PPS: Hi, I’m Dina—an executive and transition coach. And if you’re wondering whether how you are living your life today is how you want to spend the next ten to fifteen years of your career, let’s chat. No need to defer your dreams any further. I’m only one DM away. 🤗

Resources:

• This week’s song is I DREAM A WORLD. It’s a famous choral song based on Hughes’ powerful 1941 poem of the same name. Lyrics: 

  I dream a world where man
  No other man will scorn,
  Where love will bless the earth
  And peace its paths adorn
  I dream a world where all
  Will know sweet freedom’s way,
  Where greed no longer saps the soul
  Nor avarice blights our day.
  A world I dream where black or white,
  Whatever race you be,
  Will share the bounties of the earth
  And every man is free,
  Where wretchedness will hang its head
  And joy, like a pearl,
  Attends the needs of all mankind-
  Of such I dream, my world!