As part of a book club that attracts folks at an inflection point, I'm currently reading Jim Collins' What To Make of a Life.
I've not read his other books, but apparently he has quite a following in the tech / business world, and the founder of this book club is a Business School professor.
The book consists of a summary of lessons gleaned from studying the available information on a number of well-documented (i.e., famous) lives. While the methods are not the most rigorous, the observations ring true.
One aspect that I find reassuring is the ability to convey concepts in language that makes sense.
Cliff: a crossroads that changes your reality in a significant way - job loss, death of someone you care about, extreme personal or professional failure or success, revelation of a deception.
Fog: the very normal period of recalibration where the future path ahead is unclear and there is insecurity and ambivalence about purpose, future, identity and source(s) of meaning.
Encodings: as distinct from skills, the many different inherent enthusiasms we possess that, if tapped into, might lead us to the deep pleasure of engagement, purpose and flow. You can nurture an encoding to develop the skills that enable it to thrive, but it's either there or it isn't at the outset (my apologies to the growth mindset crowd).
It's not that variations of these themes have not occurred to me or you, and that they reveal some profound truth we wouldn't stumbled across if left to our own devices.
It's more that they provide a shorthand to communicate the very real state I am in at present: I've reached a cliff, am wandering through a fog, and I'm thinking and jotting down ideas and iterating until I stumble across the next encoding that reveals itself through my mini-experiments with reinvention.