But Life doesn’t conform to concepts. It doesn’t fit into neat categories or frameworks. Life is vast, fluid, and ungraspable, always moving beyond the limits of thought.
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, meetings, 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.
It is pure fantasy to think that you could have done things differently or lived your life any other way.
This dream of an imagined past feeds an equally unhelpful delusion of the future in which you consciously learn and strive to change ‘yourself’ and do things differently.
All of these behaviours and activities happen, of course, but not as the result of conscious so-called will but automatically and spontaneously from our unconscious.
We do what we do when we do it whatever our conscious awareness may declare to the contrary.
Our thoughts and ideas are the least of us. Always late to the party that’s already in full swing, uninvited yet full of their own self importance and righteousness. Taking credit for everything and responsibility for nothing.
If my happiness depends on someone or something or on a particular set of circumstances, then I am one miserable dude. Happiness isn’t a thermometer. It doesn’t go up and down.
There is nothing wrong with mind. Mind is completely perfect in every respect except for thinking there is a separate you that possesses the mind and persists in wanting it to be different, which is impossible.
It is perfectly ordinary and normal that much of what we experience makes no sense. Sense is the exception rather than the rule. Indeed, the more sense we make the further away from nature and chaos we go, until we find ourselves isolated, alone and suffocating from an excess of reason, logic and meaning.
What if you did not separate yourself from the experience that is here now - whether that moment is a dark sky, a dark mood, or the joyful giggles of excited children? What if you allowed your heart to open to ALL of life, all experience - not just the things your mind imagines “should” be here? Why not awaken to the truth that what is here is an expression of a perfectly whole Reality, and invite it all back Home?
The price of living in a consumer culture is that we are tyrannized by things. Not just by things themselves, of course, but by our thoughts about things.
Out dancing last night the DJ played Prince’s Mountains and then Miss You by The Rolling Stones. This reminded me of an interview when Prince was asked if there was any Rolling Stones tune he wished he’d written to which he replied ‘Miss You’.
Asked the same question about U2’s catalogue he said something along the lines of, he could have written any of their songs but wouldn’t want to.
Previously I posted here about my soft spot for Glen Campbell’s Wichita Lineman. On further reflection it occurred to me that one of the reasons it resonates so strongly with me as an adult (having first fallen for it as a young child) is it embodies a romance of the (American) open road.
In my youth I was lucky enough to fulfil my adolescent dream of driving across North America (east to west) and travel back (west to east) via Greyhound.
Looking back on those memories I can barely detect the boundaries delineating the reality of it from the dream of it. Such is the unreliability of the mind when it comes to certainty about anything. Perhaps it is in this liminal zone, prone to suggestion, that our unconscious emerges unbidden presenting us with desires and aversions of which we were previously unaware or had forgotten.
