Comes a time when it’s all too much. You’ve lost your job, or you’re in a miserable job, or you’ve lost your job and can’t even get a miserable one. And maybe your woes are compounded by a mortgage, or little kids, or ancient parents who are doing things like getting sick or dying. Eventually, you’ll be in a situation that’s too damn much.
You try to fight back the way you always have. You network, write job letters, take courses, talk over new business ideas at lunch, and you have a lot of metrics and you’re ready to feel a lot of results-oriented self-loathing. Late at night, exhausted, you inveigh mentally against recruiters, work culture, countries without humane healthcare (eyes on you, America), and against the cruel sea in general. You also castigate yourself, for being a loser. For a loser, according to popular wisdom, is what you are.
Memes to the rescue – memes from the belly of the beast. You’re supposed to inventory your interests now, and find your true purpose. Or center yourself with mindfulness, and find your true purpose. Or try something adventurous and new and … true purpose. Most of us get as far as imagining meme-driven writers’ cottages, or studying Aikido, or starting a design firm, or, in my case, making wooden boats in Maine. And pretty quickly after this we all ditch the memeage, because it’s impractical, and it’s also childishly superficial advice. And, eventually, we ditch memedreams for another reason.
The reason feels at first like nihilism. But it isn’t. It’s a healthier impulse than that. When you’re finally too tired, too confused, and too pissed off to do any more fighting, and you really don’t care whether or not you’re a loser in the way of the world, you’re actually beginning to live. And if you don’t bolt back to the land of memes and success metrics, you’re living very bravely. For most of us, true growing doesn’t happen until a necessary misfortune pushes us out of where we were. No one leaves a comfort zone willingly, after all, because why would we? Well, here’s the thing about the growing we do when we have to: it turns out to be less about learning new things, and more about unlearning things we thought were right. David Bowie observed not long ago that aging (and for aging, read ‘growing’) is the remarkable process through which we become the people we were always supposed to be. Richard Rohr, the Franciscan, elaborates. When you come to the end of your resources, when you reach the finitude of what he calls the false self, you fall ‘upwards’, which is to say, into your true self, the person you’ve been since the beginning. The false self isn’t a bad thing, for it gave you the functionality to get to where you are now. It just isn’t enough. It can get you no further than where you are now.
You won’t engineer your own okayness from here, in other words. Not with all the plans and networking and meditation lessons in the world. But your okayness has always been there, so you don’t have to. And it’s allowing yourself to fall into who you really – really – are, a process which requires your being led, and yes, I mean supernaturally (sorry, world), that alone will free you. It’ll be to a place you’ve never seen, but that when you reach, you won’t see with the eyes of a stranger. Yes, you’ll get a job, too. Don’t worry about that part.