Seeker's Journey: The Unexpected Path

A cloud of dust enveloped the car as Seeker pulled off to the side of the road.  Something had piqued his interest, and being the curious sort, he stopped to check it out.  Leading off away from the road was an unpaved trail, a route Seeker had never noticed before.  As the dust settled, Seeker emerged from his car with three maps in his hand, and he studied them.


One map held only destinations.  Seeker had been to some of them, and he had been told that many others were "must see" locations.  The most desirable destinations had names like Happy Marriage, Financial Security, Meaningful Work, and Healthy Children.  Other destinations were on the map, too.  Dead-End Job, Credit Card Debt, Hopeless Addiction . . . places that one may pass through or get stuck in, but not places that people were clamoring to find.  Sometimes it was hard to tell which was which just by a name on the map, but once a person spent time in a place, its character became more apparent.

It had been easier for Seeker to find his way to some desirable locations because of a second map he possessed.  Although the second map had no destinations marked, it conveyed the routes that one might take.  The map indicated which routes were easy, which were challenging, and which were somewhere in between.  It revealed which paths were well-traveled and which would make for lonely journeys.  Some roads had special requirements, like training in a specific skill or approval of a particular person, and some were patently unsafe.  When Seeker remembered to compare the two maps, he had been able to discern manageable routes to some of the destinations he had been encouraged to find.

This unknown trail leading off the well-traveled road was something of a conundrum.  Here was a clear route that someone had surely traveled before, and yet there was no indication of it on his map.  Since Seeker had never come across an obvious road that didn't appear on the map, he initially doubted that he even saw the odd road at all.  When his eyes remained convinced that the unpaved trail was indeed a reality, he began to doubt his ability to read the map.  But after a moment of getting his bearings, he surmised that this curious trail had somehow escaped being transcribed upon the map he possessed.  He wondered where it led.

It was obvious that his destination map could not shed any light on the trail, and his map of routes was of no use here.  So, Seeker opened the third map he had, a cartographic wonder that someone special had given him long ago.  He had never needed it before, since the other two maps had served him in every other circumstance.  As Seeker unfolded the page, he secretly hoped that it would give him a good reason to explore that mysterious trail.  The third map was unlike the other two in its simplicity.  It was comprised of a single symbol, an arrow pointing in one specific direction.  When Seeker oriented the page toward the unpaved road, it became clear that the arrow pointed directly down the intriguing trail.

With a burst of exuberance, Seeker grabbed a few necessities and locked his car.  He so wanted to find out where the new path led.  A sense of wonder and excitement enfolded him as he set off in an unknown direction, imagining where it might lead.

To be continued...

In Sync with Me

Jung's concept of synchronicity is a featured concept in Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, which I have been working through with a few friends over the past several weeks.  Essentially, synchronicity is "the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner."  In other words, seemingly connected events that don't have a high probability of happening concurrently.  While I am much more prone to labeling such things as coincidences unless they are uncannily pertinent to what I'm doing personally, I have been trying to notice when events seem to be lining up in a significant way.  Perhaps this willingness and intentionality on my part has contributed to a feeling of being "in sync" with my life.

Most theories of personal growth and development postulate an even number of phases, cycling through focusing inward and focusing on something external.  The first phase is usually something akin to survival, concentrating all of one's energy toward getting the basic necessities.  A second phase (if one is able to trust that survival will happen) is often adopting an external set of rules or goals, whether they originate from a church, a political organization, or some other institution with established beliefs.  The next phase would be integrating the meaningful beliefs from outside oneself into a period of defining personal identity.  And once deeper self-actualization has taken place, the following phase would address how to engage with the broader society, or at least some portion of it.  I can see this pattern at work when I look backward at my journey, but I have often been wrestling with whatever phase I've been in.

When I was clearly (looking back) in phases of clarifying personal values, I was also often struggling to engage more purposefully with a larger group.  And sometimes when I have accepted a prominent role within a larger group, I have found myself confronted with challenges about what beliefs are most meaningful to me personally.  While the internal and external work can be in balance, I have frequently tried to force myself to focus in a particular direction when I wasn't actually in the "right" phase to do so.  I have wanted to guard against being focused too narrowly and missing some important piece of personal doctrine.  Certain beliefs about what life "ought" to be about have served better at some junctures than others.  To put it another way, I haven't always been willing to let myself grow because I was afraid of what beliefs I might grow out of.

Everyone has a doctrine—a system of beliefs they live by.  Some piece of a person's doctrine may be incorporated from external sources, and some may come from an internal sense of what's important or how things should be.  But at some point, the beliefs have to become personal if they are going to have deep value.  Living by a doctrine that someone else created for you doesn't reflect integrity.  That's just a sort of irresponsible obedience.  Integrity comes from taking a personal stand for one's own life, claiming a personal set of beliefs not to judge right and wrong in others but to identify what has true personal value.

At some points in my life, the beliefs that primarily informed my decisions were actually different from what I thought I should believe.  I was in conflict with my own doctrine, but I didn't realize it at the time.  Now, I have been taking time to really think about what beliefs are really potent for me.  I have been giving myself permission to be honest about what's most important to me, without worrying about what might get left behind if I focus in a direction that has personal importance.  Trusting myself, with some confidence in what I have been recognizing as valuable for me, I find a strange appropriate-ness in the opportunities I am creating and discovering.

While I may have told myself so in the past as a reassurance or believed it intellectually, I feel in a very deep way that I am in exactly the right place at exactly the right moment in my life.  It's not synchronicity, but I believe that noticing the "rightness" of my experience comes from being conscious of my personal doctrine and aware of how I am able to engage life in a meaningful way.  And when I know that what I believe makes sense, fear has a lot less of a foothold.

Recapitulation

 In some pieces of music (specifically those with a sonata-allegro structure), the themes from the beginning return later on after a time of "development".  This return is called the recapitulation, and it marks a very dramatic moment in the music.  It's similar to hearing a jazz piece in which the soloist introduces the melody, and then improvises for a while, going as far afield as he dares from that original tune.  When he returns to the melody again, it is a striking moment that (hopefully) ties all of his improvisatory development back to the foundation of the piece.  The same thing can happen in Indian ragas, and in fact many other musical styles.  The moment of return to the familiar is poignant.

But the music is never quite the same the second time around.  Even if it held the exact same notes, we would still hear the recapitulation differently than the first iteration of those themes.  The development that leads up to the moment of return fills our ears with many different possibilities, regardless of the style.  The music at that moment of return could be identical to what we heard before, but we are different.  We may be excited or satisfied when the music gets back to that familiar melody, even though we hear it through a filter of information we didn't have before. 

The development helps us to appreciate the original melodies more fully by wandering away from the full blown themes of a piece and using bits and pieces of those ideas for musical meandering.  The development can be exciting, but almost always has an unstable feeling.  To our ears, it's restless, in motion.  The return to the integrity of the initial themes of a piece feel like a destination after all of the development's instability.  The recapitulation seems stable.  Emotionally, it's a clear sense of arrival.

Life does that, too.  As I have been looking at applying for a college teaching position after a few years of development, I have a comfortable sense of familiarity, and yet I am different from the person I was the last time I lived this theme.  My path has certainly held direction and purpose, but there honestly has been some instability in pushing against my own perceived limitations.  Covering new ground is exciting, but it can also be frighteningly uncertain.  Returning to the idea of teaching music at a university not only has familiarity, though.  I have greater clarity about that theme because of the time in between.

Having taken the time to discern what has greatest value in my life, I can approach the familiar decision differently than I did in the final months of my doctorate degree.  I know now how much I love being in the classroom and teaching performers the keys to getting beyond the notes and creating engaging music.  I'm aware of how valuable it is to me to nurture my own creativity, and I have a greater appreciation for organizational dynamics.  Essentially, I guess I'm more mature than I was the first time I started applying for teaching positions, although I wasn't altogether immature before.  I've been through a development section, and sending out letters of application and a revised Curriculum Vitae feels like a recapitulation--an arrival point at someplace familiar I can now see in a new way.

How Selfish

When the flight attendants do the bit about putting on your own oxygen mask before helping those around you, it has always been clear why they would need to tell me that so directly.  It's natural for me to put aside my own wants or needs for other people.  So if a situation demands that I take care of myself first, it seems like the exception.  I'm realizing how much more that could represent the norm, how satisfying it can be to focus my attention on my own personal vision.

In the past, I've written about my fear that, underneath it all, I'm a selfish person.  This fear has been with me for awhile, but over the last couple of years, I have focused more purposefully on ridding myself of it.  The problem has been that so much of what I am truly passionate about was taking a backseat to other noble endeavors, and to concentrate more fully on my own dreams and personal vision seemed selfish.  It's hard to get rid of a belief when one is regularly creating new evidence for it.  At the same time, I frequently allow my own goals to be less important than the goals of others, probably because I don't want to appear selfish to myself or anybody else.   

Not being selfish has been the underlying cause of many issues for me.  Most of the situations that I found dissatisfying as an adult have resulted from me working to improve the processes or culture of a place when my ideas were not universally valued.  Instead of focusing my efforts on what mattered most to me, I sublimated what I saw as selfish goals for the sake of a greater good.  I turned my creative abilities and strategic skill toward external organizations rather than using them for my own selfish endeavors, and in so doing, I created a no-win situation for myself.

Now, I believe that there is a difference between being selfish and being self-absorbed.  I believe that one can be both selfish and compassionate.  In fact, I believe that one must be selfish in order to see a personal vision through to fruition.  Creating a life with deep personal meaning often requires guarding time against distractions and choosing relationships that are supportive over those that are toxic.  One may call it self-awareness to soften the blow, but it has certainly felt like selfishness to me.  The truth is, there has never been anything wrong with being selfish, aside from my own personal judgment against myself.

The big lie was not that I am a selfish person.  The big lie is that it is wrong to be selfish.  If I focus on the things I most want in my life, I'll still be creating something that has a broader impact, but it won't be at the expense of my own satisfaction.  Giving myself permission to be selfish without imposing anything on anyone else is one of the most freeing things I have ever done.  I am still interested in being of service to other people, and I know that I will be.  But it makes sense to secure my own oxygen mask and breathe for myself before I help the people around me.

The Truth About Rejection

My wife picks over bananas each week in the supermarket, carefully selecting a couple that were still green, a couple that were solid bright yellow, and two with peels that are being overtaken with brown spots.  She knows that the bananas will ripen over the week, and she knows from experience what degree of ripeness she prefers.  So with her, bananas have an equal chance of being selected no matter what their degree of ripeness.  Entire piles of bananas still get rejected by her each week, but only because we can't possibly eat every banana in the store.  She doesn't think much about the feelings of the bananas that get left behind (or the ones she buys).

A friend recently purchased a new truck.  It looks a lot like his old truck, except that it's a little bit bigger and it has fewer miles on it.  Before he got to the dealership, he had already rejected many possibilities of cars, minivans, and SUVs.  He had some very good reasons for wanting a truck, and he wasn't concerned about how all those cars would feel when he didn't even give them a glance.  Somebody else will likely prefer a car over a truck and the cars will get their chance.

We make selections every day about things, which means we choose some ideas and reject others.  We absolutely have to reject some ideas, otherwise we would be paralyzed by the number of choices we have.  When it comes to food or cars or other purchased goods, it's easy for us to narrow down our options based on what we want.  When people get involved, rejection becomes a much more loaded issue.  People actually have feelings that we intrinsically care about, and we know from personal experience how many decisions we make every day out of fear of rejection.

Why do we hold acceptance in such high esteem?  Do we really believe that any person can be accepted by everyone?  Or do we care more about what it says about us when someone rejects us?  Something must be wrong with us if we get rejected, right?

But, wait a minute.  Nothing was really wrong with all of the bananas left for other shoppers at the grocery store; it was a simple matter of knowing how many we can eat in a week.  And nothing was really wrong with all of the vehicles my friend passed by to get to the truck he wanted; they just weren't what he wanted.  When we face rejection ourselves, it's really about someone else expressing a preference.  On the one hand, we would like to be "preferred" for a relationship or a job.  On the other hand, we wouldn't necessarily enjoy just any relationship or job.  We have our preferences, too.


I want the music I write to have broad appeal, but everybody isn't going to like it.  The key is for me to find the people that prefer what I compose and focus on partnership with those people.  It doesn't mean that I have been rejected as a human being just because my music wasn't chosen for a particular project, and it also doesn't mean I need to change what I am writing into something universally appealing.

The same is true as I continue to build my coaching practice.  If I try to be all things to all people, I will fall short.  I have areas of strength, and there are honestly some people I would prefer to work with.  By defining a niche, I focus my energy and my attention.  Choosing to focus on a certain group of people means setting myself up for rejection by people who are not part of that group.  When that happens, it will be an indication to me that I have defined a niche well, and hopefully the people who are a part of that focal group will be able to see that as an advantage for them.

Whether it's with the music I compose, the people I choose to coach, or the relationships I nurture, the key is to be honest about what I want in my life.  Some would call this authenticity.  When I am being true to myself, there are some people who love being a part of what I am creating, and there are many others who ... well, reject me.  That's alright.  It means that I have defined myself more clearly for anyone who sees me.  And when I'm being honest about who I am, and when I'm not afraid of rejection, being seen becomes a much easier thing to do.