āThe Rebbe then elaborated: āAll knowledge youāll ever learn, every experience youāll have in life, are the circles. Theyāre not the center. If you donāt have a solid center, youāll have jagged circles, incomplete circles, many different circles. I sense that you need that center before you start building your circlesā.ā ā Joseph Telushkin, Rebbe: The Life and Teachings of Menachem M. Schneerson, the Most Influential Rabbi in Modern History
It seems an age since I last wrote about social media. The reason I stopped was not borne out of disillusionment but the paradigm had run its course.
If I have one regret, though, itās that I didnāt connect the dots beyond a slew of platforms and the ability to share a message. Where I wanted to get to was to show how true self, not the self buried beneath ego, might be revealed in the creative act — think Instagram, blogging and Soundcloud. Iām not suggesting that you canāt have egoic tendencies in āartistā mode, but when we do something for the love of it, everything falls away.
Where does that leave me now?
Writing, speaking and coaching?
Possibly, but more than anything else, to invite the question: āWho or what am I?ā.
Why?
Because, in the meaning, weāre far more likely to understand the meaning of (our) life than we are to cling to innumerable but ultimately faux dreams.
Ask yourself this question: how many times have you set out on a path only to discover: (a) it was the wrong one; and/or (b) it left you bereft of purpose?
āBut, even when such [personal] dreams convert into action, they rarely if ever produce the desired result. They may become goals, but the goals themselves are suspect once one has achieved them.Ā They never deliver the goods our imagination so hopefully promised us. They never give us more life.ā — Michael E. Gerber, Awakening the Entrepreneur Within
Of course, it doesnāt stop us from trying. And for many people thatās how they see their lives — a mirage of failed dreams. Even if they do question the intent of their lifeās work, something always gets in the way of asking anything deeper and more profound than āWhatās next?ā.
And on one level thatās perfectly understandable but, on a secondary, perhaps more life-affirming way, it doesnāt leave room for anything remotely spiritual. (As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin says: āWe are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.ā)
In my case, and for a long time, I didnāt allow any space with which to question my personhood. If I explored any territory, it was how I could squeeze more out of the day in pursuit of a higher realm. (I know this sounds moronic but thatās how it was: my success credo was measured in units of 6 minutes. Nothing more. Nothing less.)
In the end, it made me bitter and angry. In fact, there were periods where I questioned my sanity to the point where I couldnāt see any meaning to life, despite the fact I had a wife and three children to support and who loved me.
To get off this rank hamster wheel I had to suffer a sudden shock, which not only made me question my mortality but made me realise that life was too important to be given over to meaningless work, no matter the financial consequences. (Trust me, the money is a very important part of the role; for many lawyers, itās all theyāve got.)
And so I lept.
I didnāt think about it.
I acted on instinct.
I knew that if I stayed shackled to the wheel of money-making lawyering, and despite my best efforts, in no time at all Iād be back where I started. And it would be worse than before: having had my eyes opened to a new spiritual dimension, Iād question things beyond the usual I-hate-what-I-do mutterings, and would be forced to act in a mindstate that wasnāt conducive to making sensible let alone rational decisions.
To say I was intent on looking for let alone advocating meaning in my work would be over egging things. At best I wanted the freedom to be 100% me. To know that there was more to my vocation than working for a living, chasing the money and a pimped up title that didnāt amount to anything more than table decoration.
Up to a point it worked, but I fell victim to the āFatal Assumptionā:
āThat Fatal Assumption is: if you understand the technical work of a business, you understand a business that does that technical work.
And the reason itās fatal is that it just isnāt true.
In fact, itās the root cause of most small business failures!ā
— Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited
But thatās not entirely true; it would have been more apposite if Iād left one law firm qua lawyer to practice on my own account. Instead, I left to pursue a career, if you can call it that, in the brave new world of digital (media). In my non-knowing I couldnāt really make any assumptions but in hindsight there was still a naivety to my plans. Hindsight is a wonderful thing!
Actually, it wasnāt digital that fascinated me most but my own unfolding, particularly in the creative arena. You see, having invested all my energies, since age 15, in developing my left-brain skills (despite me flunking on so many fronts), I soon discovered, through a mixture of blogging, podcasting and speaking, that I was incredibly creative. In fact, once I turned on the right-brain tap, I couldnāt turn it off. (At times it scared me to death. It was like Iād found my new best friend, and the energy I felt was overwhelming.)
When I say unfolding, I donāt just mean Iād discovered a new skill set or found a way to channel my creative bent. It was more of case of layers upon layers of emotional baggage being slowly removed, the sort of baggage laid down by years of self-talk predicated upon a dream of someone elseās making.
I found it very painful. There was I thinking I was going to be some hot shot lawyer only to discover it was a pile of horsesh*t. How was it I couldnāt see through my maligned thinking before now? Was I that easily sold on a dream predicated on keeping my nose clean, doing exactly as I was told but never, and I mean never, expressing anything other than a minute fraction of my true self? It appeared so.
Iām sure weāve all questioned our career choices but this time around, particularly when I had the freedom to explore things previously outside my economic purview, I went much deeper. In fact, it was a case of living into my words like never before.
Take something like the hackneyed phrase, ādo what you loveā. What happens when you repeatedly do that? One thingās for sure you donāt make a lot of money, and in some cases, as I found out with subjects like blogging and podcasting, you make absolutely nothing. But it doesnāt matter. Not in the struggling artist sense, but it doesnāt matter because when your heart opens, the money doesnāt come into it. Instead, full expression is whatās at stake and you canāt afford to give 50% effort as is so often the case with āworkersā.
And I kept pressing this unfolding button both in my work, reading and contemplation. I also enlisted the help of a mentor who pushed me into new areas, areas that very often werenāt just alien but made me feel quite uncomfortable.
In the end, they all pointed in one direction, namely the āIā to my āI Amā.
āWe become something other than the product of everything that goes on about us that we canāt even begin to explain. We become the center of ourselves. We become the mover as opposed to the moved.ā — Michael E. Gerber
Throughout this process I was mindful of my egoic self coming alive to something new, something to distract me and something to brag about; but mainly as a result of repeated practice, I was able to observe any thoughts that pulled me out of true self. I mean to say that when we find something new, and, in my case, life-changing new, weāre all possessed of this pernicious habit of wanting not just to tell everyone but to convert everyone to our cause.
The truth is no oneās remotely interested. I know this from the discussions Iāve had with my wife. If Iāve mentioned self-enquiry and the practice of contemplation once, Iāve mentioned it a hundred times. In the beginning there was a discreet acknowledgment that Iād found something to exercise my curious self, and despite my most valiant attempts to convert my wife to my ways, I never managed to touch her soul. (As I now understand, weāre either drawn to something or weāre not.)
In arriving at this point, you may wonder why I continue to write and speak about true self? In short, because Iāve no choice. Actually itās stronger than that: itās because Iām called to do so. By who? I donāt know. By what? Iāve not investigated. But as I heard on the Undivided Life by Parker J. Palmer (a wonderful audio programme), just because something is impossible doesnāt mean we shouldnāt do it.
Do I have a vision for how a world of enlightened, true self people would look? Yes. And it doesnāt look like a bunch of deluded, look-at-me types but instead a group of committed people who see the world connected by a single meme: to express their genius in pursuit of a higher goal. And when I say higher, I do mean to suggest God but not in the white-bearded, old man shape but where everything is one, and one is everything. A connected world where we share a common set of values in pursuit of something that lifts our soul and holds it to the highest ideal — love in pursuit of love. I accept that this sounds way out there but what else is there? Or rather, why else are we here? To be remembered for our toys or our acts of selfish service (very few people do something expecting nothing in return)? I hope not.
If this seems remote from my day to day existence, then I accept that. Right now, Iām still trying to find a path where I can do what Iām called to do, and deal with the demands of being a husband, father and colleague. Itās not easy, but only in the sense of finding the time to share my message and move the needle from dream to vision to some sort of reality. If I had a blank sheet of paper, Iād love to start a retreat centre focused primarily on those people whoāve suffered as Iāve suffered in trying to make sense of their lives in a vocational setting. I could go even narrower and look at lawyers whoāve woken up to the reality that a life of study, sacrifice and hard work isnāt enough to sustain them emotionally, spiritually or, in some cases, financially. Even if I couldnāt get that idea off the ground, Iād like to spend more time talking to and sharing my thinking on true self. At the very least, by exploring our inner terrain we might begin to understand the link between thought, feelings and universal mind. Weāll see.
For now though Iām content to blog, speak and coach. Even if I canāt touch as many people as Iād like, just to touch a few will be more than enough to satisfy my need to help those that wish to awaken, awaken to their true, genius self.