Sometimes we are confronted with the “bottom line” of
our own being…the unequivocal, indisputable, and too often both enervating and
uplifting evidence and accompanying insight that we may have been too
frightened to acknowledge.
If we have lived much of our “career” and family life
in a manner of “genuflecting” to authority, of accommodating the will and
interests and attitudes and beliefs of others, regardless of our avowed motive,
and come to a point where that modus operandi is no longer ‘working’ for us, we
often seek to discern why.
And that process of discernment, while at first
appearing to us as analogous to the mechanic looking under the hood of our car
to find a burnt-out spark plug, or a dirty carburetor, and then replace the
spark plug and/or clean the carburetor, often does not comply with such a
simple ‘fix’. In fact, how and why we may have been conducting ourselves, in
our purest belief that we are, were and always have been ‘doing our best’ as we
were counselled and conditioned to do as youths, those how’s and why’s may have
escaped our conscious awareness of the more complex motivations,
understandings, beliefs and attitudes that have been marinating, like wine
ageing, for decades.
We may have had physical symptoms of diseased organs,
broken bones, separated joints, broken teeth, or even defective vision and we
may also have spent many nights tossing and turning in an anxious and confused
twisting that spoke of a deeper twisting within our minds and hearts. Our
thoughts and our feelings, right from birth, have been more significant and
more complex that our parents, and even our doctors and certainly our clergy
have been telling us. Simple diagnoses, bromides for ‘good behaviour’ and
diatribes of hell and damnation if one sinned, were not, and never will be,
adequate for healthy and effective parenting, nor for healthy medical practice,
and certainly not for adequate or even appropriate religious and spiritual
tutelage.
“Impostering” unconsciously as “loving parents” as an
effective, ethical and inspiring archetype for nurses, doctors, teachers, and
clergy, for starters, is a cultural model fraught with serious dangers. Each
‘client’ in the exercise of that cultural model is necessarily a child, while
the ‘professional’ is, by definition and by default, the parent. A healthy
culture, however, requires and even demands that those constricting ‘roles’ be
excised like the skin of a rocket as it enters space, leaving the incipient
adult free to fly like the unburdened space ship, unencumbered by those
protective shields. And yet the comfort of knowing “what” one is, as opposed to
“who” one is reaps tons of social, political, medical, and corporate/economic
endorsement, wages, affirmations, ladders to climb, offices to occupy, targets
to design and then strive to reach, awards and rewards a plenty verbal,
anecdotal, promotions, family accolades, and even, for some, albs, chasubles,
and stoles, for others, epaulettes, stars, stripes and rank.
It comes as no surprise to anyone that the shift from “a
what” a “human doing” to a “who” a “human being” is treacherous for the
individual and potentially even more threatening to those who “love” him or
her. It is not only the shedding of the politically correct, and career-driven
behaviours that “go” but also the very foundations of how we see ourselves and the
rest of the world is potentially shifted, as are tectonic plates in an
earthquake. As Jung reminds us, for the first forty-five years, we concentrate
on our extrinsic being, our career path, our capacity and success in climbing whatever
ladder we have selected as the one we consider our best opportunity….sometimes
even based on something vague like a deep interest or even a passion. In the
second half, Jung reminds us we pursue intrinsic, personal, spiritual, perhaps
intellectual or religious interests and passions and pathways. It is as if a kind
of metaphoric birth/death conflation erupts inside of us, seemingly pushing us
to dig deeper into our past, our memories, our childhood, and whatever pain
that might be inhibiting our daily psychic sunrise, our evolution/transformation
from chrysalis to butterfly in the natural world. And inevitably, such a
process of shedding, is an invitation to experience a hint of loss, a kind of
death, as if we need to prepare for our ultimate human demise. This experience of shifting from a full-bodied
commitment to career, salary, children, travel, furniture, highly rated dining
experiences, the best films, plays and books, for some. For others it might be
a shift from a senior executive office to a volunteer philanthropic non-profit
working in the developing world. For others, it might mean turning from an
accounting position to becoming a film-maker, writer, director or even actor.
These shifts could also emerge out of failed relationships, failed connections,
of which both parties are an integral part.
Of course, the original birth process is and was
painful, implicitly and explicitly embracing life-threatening dangers to the
mother, and a similar set of risks to the new baby. New ideas, new structures,
designs, programs, equations, new medical treatments….all of the plethora of
images and examples of change, bring with them a similar set of both literal
and metaphorical risks, dangers, threats and complications. And, as creatures
of both what we know and what we do not know, clinging naturally to those
things we know best, (then transforming themselves autonomously into “fixed
facts” and potentially even beliefs), we have a built-in psychological and
cognitive ‘instrument’ or mechanism or habit or inculcated scepticism to
question, to doubt, to probe and to speculate about whether or even if the ‘new
thing’ (or approach, or process, or even the potential viability) makes any
sense.
This scepticism is at the heart of science; it walks
into the patients’ room with every doctor, whether perceptible or not,
especially if the presenting symptoms seem foreign. Doubt is also at the root
of not only our perception of the value of a new idea; it also comes to the
fore when we meet new people, especially in an age when so much public
discourse is focused on distrust, lies, dissembling and narcissistic self-interest.
Link a new person with a new idea, to a larger community in which both new
people and new ideas are especially troublesome, and the potential negative
impact might be inevitable, even if such potential is not part of the polite
and superficial discourse that tends to dominate in a culture of anxiety and
fear and uncertainty and doubt.
So this two-edged sword known by various names like
doubt, ambiguity, scepticism and uncertainty, prods the scientist, the
detective, the defence counsel, the doctor, the scholar, the researcher and the
anthropologist, and possibly a few theologians and even fewer clergy, all
reporters and artists and philosophers, can have the impact of a plague
sociologically and culturally and politically. Social change, cultural transformation,
even with a company or a specific business, is demonstrably fraught with
complexities that only recently have researchers open that ‘pandora’s box’
unpacking the multiple dimensions of the equation, the multiple symptoms, the
interaction of many persons and actors on any given ‘stage’…It is not to say
that all of our human interactions are merely theatrical, and thereby only
play-acting and covered in mascara. Nor is it to say that many of our human
observations and speculations and judgements are based on the intersection of a
few “images” with the deepest perceptions, attitudes and beliefs. And all of
those perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs, themselves, have been gathered and
stored and marinated in our consciousness and our unconsciousness during the
whole of our physical life.
Some of our conscious awareness of those ‘hidden’
forces, influencers, nudges and perceptions comprise much of our public image,
while many also lie under the leaves of our forgotten memories, our buried
traumas, our having been ‘stood-up’ on a promising blind date, our having been
scorned by an ‘alpha’ mentor/coach/parent who put his/her needs far ahead of
our needs at that moment, or our subjection/submission to the will of a
tyrant/parent/teacher/clergy/doctor whose own perception of his or her role and
responsibility were so deformed as to manipulate him or herself as well as
his/her clients/patients.
Something in the language of therapy, known as
‘transference’ as well as another process also from therapy known as ‘projection’
are two of the cultural torrential rivers that flow in and through the many
conversations that are conducted in all scenes of our lives. And yet, neither
of them is either comprehended, nor openly acknowledged in most of those
exchanges. Nor are they meant to be. We are not therapists for each other; we
are not doctors or nurses, or teachers, or professors, or especially parents
for each other.
And yet….how diligently many of us deploy into roles
to spread the “gospel” of whatever institution, school, ideology, guru, or even
a unique and selective compilation of teaching and thinking and process
“answers” to life’s many problems we have experienced! And as we mature,
naturally we find correlations between some of the themes, ideas, processes and
learn somethings about how and when to apply them.
Roles do not automatically, like snake skin, slide
off, leaving a new and fresh and perhaps even
more protective and also highly attractive new skin. There are nights of
driving around throughout the dark, trying to decide whether or not to put that
envelope in the mail that finalizes a resignation, a retirement, a divorce, a
partnership, a business ownership, perhaps even the title to a residence that
one has called home for decades. That same night, after the mail has been deposited,
the road seems to close in, and the morning seems as if it will never come.
Self-doubt, even vibes of terror waken nerves
previously sleeping. What have I done? And whatever that is can never be
undone! And what will person x,y,z…think about this decision? And how will this
decision impact those people who were counting on me?
And the ride into and through that night can be as
frightful as waking at 90 kilometers/hour on the wrong side of a two-lane highway,
with a U-Haul trailer dragging behind a sub-compact, filled with furniture,
books, typewriter, clothes and a few household items like brooms, lamps, and
the usual personal items. Only after a second instance of waking on the left
side of a two-lane road, comes the realization that one might be advised to
stop, slap his face, take a deep drink of water and even a slow walk around the
car, in order to proceed safely until a safe place to sleep comes into view.
And then, after the personal shock, there are
seemingly numberless shedding of those previously treasured roles,
expectations, personal meetings, agendas, plans and investments of both
finances and personal energy that were calculated to enhance both current
reality and long-term retirement. If one seemed ambiguous or insensitive to
ambiguity previously, there is no mistaking its rearing its ugly head in the
darkness.
Where am I going? Why am I doing this? What is it that
I am really trying to do? Whom will I encounter who tries to send me back to a
former life? What will I say if and when that happens? Am I really searching
for ‘who’ I am, or attempting to find a new person, previously unknown and
unavailable to me, or so I thought? What if all of those anxieties and failures,
insults and defamations of character that I felt like arrows in my back were true?
What if those worst enemies of mine could see through me and I merely put up a
fortress wall to appear invincible?
It is not so much a search for absolute “correct” answers
to these questions that one needs. It is more like opening a new box of
attributes, like a personal Pandora’s Box of hidden feelings, memories,
experiences and their meaning that now come face to face with the feeling of nothingness,
worthlessness and meaninglessness, the kind of feelings the existentialists
once dubbed the ‘existential moment’ when one becomes conscious of one’s own
meaningless.
Only, different from adolescence or early adulthood,
this time, the force of the clap of thunder and the shock of lightning that
erupts over the highway send one further into uncertainty, and potentially even
despair.
Soldiering on, alone, in the dark, perceiving that all
ties to the past have been ruptured, may seem to many quixotic, to some even
suicidal. However, there is a part of this narrative that accompanies the
millions of crossings of thresholds, of careers, of relationships, of
geographies, of ideologies, faiths, and even into that cave of faithlessness. Soldiering
on is neither heroic or necessarily fatal. It is a challenge for which no one
can know if they are ready, prepared or even suited. There are no maps, except
those of the galaxies, the histories, the biographies especially of those whose
descendants we are, and the DNA’s genome, the existence of which we can only
see faintly in the mist.
It is a walk along a river shrouded in mist, this walk/drive
into the night. There may be a few stars, only a few are perceived. There may
be the occasional own in a tree by the road; yet only a faint echo of his call
is heard. There may even be a few raindrops in this London fog of the mind, the
body and the spirit.
And, yet decades later, on reflection, the trip is one
that can never be forgotten, in its most intimate detail. It is also one that,
somehow infuses and injects a large dose of psychic adrenalin, so potent as to
linger for decades, at least in memory, if not in body and mind.
That compliant, politically correct, perfectionist who
once heard words like ‘fag’ and ‘jesus’ shouted from afar in contemptuous
derision, and whose mind was filled with chants of worthlessness, inadequacy
and shame, will eventually emerge from the darkness into a different kind of
light. And in that new light, there will be a new kind of perception and consciousness
that enables a different kind of strength, less exercised to impress others,
less desperate for applause, and far more amenable to being comfortable with
being ordinary, which we all are from beginning to end.
