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The spiritual exhortation to end suffering and the West’s dream of pursuing happiness are the same misguided projects which only ensure suffering and the impossibility of happiness.
Every moment of existence has value. It all counts.
Understanding who one is has nothing to do with identity or images of selfhood. Knowing who you are means accepting your wholeness, embracing every aspect of your being, the dark and the light. We discover that we are who we and not who we think we are or who we would like to be. This recognition requires a radical honesty and letting go of fantasies of identity.
Life has a way of revealing to us who we are whether we ask for it or not.
You do not have to be good.
Wild Geese, Mary Oliver
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
If I have to suffer, then let it be from my reality. A neurosis is a much greater curse!
In general, a neurosis is a replacement for an evasion, an unconscious desire to cheat life, to avoid something.
Carl Jung
I rarely write about my work and I have no idea why. It seems I am simply not moved to.
That said it appears, today, that I am moved to say something, in relation to a previous post which mentioned imposter syndrome.
To cut an exceedingly long and boring story short, I worked for many years in publishing and marketing as a graphic and web designer.
Although earning decent money and able to provide for my family I found myself empty inside and miserable most of the time. According to the late anthropologist David Graeber I had a ‘bullshit job’.
Imposter syndrome was in full effect. I was a chancer and a fraud and I entertained a persistent inner dialogue of cruel and merciless self criticism and judgement. So far so normal.
And then the pandemic struck. Redundancy followed. I was at a loss at what to do. My wife who knew me better than I knew myself at the time, said I should get a job as a Support Worker in social care. I literally had no idea what she was talking about.
Cut to four years later and I find myself working long anti-social hours, harder than I ever have, on minimum wage, and challenged daily mentally, physically and psychologically/ emotionally. I leave every single shift exhausted, stimulated, drained, rewarded, energised, satisfied, fulfilled and grateful. And I have never been happier.
If I had to hazard a guess as to why it probably has something to do with the fact that it is work that demands the integrated combination of head, hand and heart. I also think it’s significant that it is work that has nothing to do with competitiveness, business, making money or selling anything. At work I inhabit a world free from the commercial imperative. I never sit in front of a computer. Email, spreadsheets, PowerPoints, lunch breaks, offices, desks are now nothing more than vague memories and the stuff of nightmares.
The daily preoccupation with profit, reach, statistics, branding, sales, marketing, jargon, promotion, competition, clicks, reports, presentations and strategies etc. has been replaced with concerns about human dignity, privacy, safety, mental and physical health, care, empathy, independence, choice, opportunity, support and encouragement.
I am not saying this is better or more important work than any other. Far from it. Horses for courses. Simply that when one finds, belatedly in my case, work that is most closely aligned with who one is, then any sense of being an imposter doesn’t arise.
In short, I thought I was something I wasn’t and paid the price. Now that I do what most closely aligns with who and what I am, I couldn’t feel more whole, rewarded, alive and grateful.
Life lives us whether we recognise it or not. We are fully lived regardless of what we think we do or don’t do. We are helpless in the face of life’s ceaseless animation. The relentless inevitability of our aliveness in each and every moment…
Diagnosis with a specific terminal illness changes nothing except perhaps revealing our capacity to hide and diminish the actuality which enables our aliveness. We are all born with the terminal illness of life.
The map is just another aspect of the territory.
The endless cycle of recognition of, acceptance of and gratitude for impermanence and interdependence.
Have we lost the power and agency of trusting our own instincts in the face of: the crowd, the ‘norm’, what other people think, peer/ social pressure, what we are told to think and believe etc. on and on..?
Is imposter syndrome so prevalent because so many of us try to be what we are not and instinctively, unconsciously know we will never be?
I used to have imposter syndrome when I was doing something that wasn’t truly me. When I stopped doing that and began to do what I truly am, it disappeared and never came back, despite it being harder and more challenging than what I was doing before.
The radical honesty of understanding who we are and who we’re not as well as what we are and what we are not capable of is essential. The contemporary fetish of believing that we are all capable of being anybody we choose to be and can achieve anything we want is simply delusional and harmful to our mental health.
Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.
Mary Oliver
My story isn't pleasant, it's not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.
Hermann Hesse
That anything is happening at all trumps all specific things that happen.
There may be relativistic problems of the world to solve but you are not one of them.
Nirvana is where you are, provided you don't object to it.
Alan Watts
Identification with concepts, imagination and with images of selfhood are all part of the same energy and process of human aliveness. There is no separation. The ‘human condition’ as such, is living this, is being this, is expressing this very paradox without splitting apart, yet remaining whole and indivisible. Aperspectival — The ever-present origin.
There is a beautiful irony and paradox in that seeking, meditating and in some way taking action to see what is already present, is also the same energy, movement and process of aliveness that also takes no action.
Don’t believe the hype…
Public Enemy
…the mind is its own place, and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n…
John Milton
Simply being is all the meaning we need, yet evidently not all the meaning we want.