"We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves." — Thomas Merton
For a big part of my life, I envied people who seemed tailor made to fit perfectly into the world as it is. The country boy, raised on a farm, who loved 4H and rodeos and cowboy boots and the smell of harvest and could not imagine a better life than to farm a patch of land of his very own. Or the city girl raised beneath the lights and glitz of the fashion industry who took to it like it was her natural habitat, leveraging her art and skill to earn her place in its secret conclaves and private runways without a second thought as to whether her life should be about anything else.
I dare say the path to destiny is not quite so smoothly paved for most of us. For most of us, the path might look more like a bowl of spaghetti, with dozens of possible paths all knotted up in a tangled mess. Or the path might include a heap of obstacles, or gates, or solid walls blocking the way, with no idea how you’ll ever get past them. Or there might be no path at all — no options on offer from the world that in any way line up with the internal compass heading of your soul.
Here’s the truth of it:
Who you become and the life you create for yourself is a process of ongoing heated negotiation with the world. And by “the world,” I mean all the systems you happen to be born into or currently inhabit — the cultural system, the economic system, the religious system, the family system, the education system, and so on.
So who you are becoming and the life you are creating for yourself is really a process of active and often antagonistic negotiation between you and all these systems you inhabit.
There’s who the world wants you to be.
And there’s who you actually are.
One of the biggest decisions you make in life, and in every season of life, is which of those voices you will allow to dominate your destiny.
Some people conform themselves entirely to become who the world wants them to be. On occasion, they are blissfully fortunate that their true nature perfectly aligns with the world’s demands, as those I mentioned in the examples above. More often, however, their true nature does not fit the world's requirements, so they sacrifice their true self for the benefits they see in living a conformist life. In my experience as a coach, however, they always come to deeply regret this choice in their later years, when they realize to their dismay that in all their years of conforming they have never breathed a single day in the simple freedom of who they really are.
Other people, much fewer in number, entirely reject the world’s expectations in favor of following their own inner North Star. Sometimes these brave souls rise up to become lighthouses of hope and inspiration for the entire world. Think of Mother Teresa, Joan of Arc, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and many other great souls throughout our history. It’s doubtful the human race would have survived this long without such beacons. Those who choose this path are equally likely to be labeled as brilliant or as fools, and their lives may lead to triumph or to misery, depending on whether the world decides they are worth all the trouble they have caused. Often such iconoclasts are not valued by the world until after they are dead. But the gifts they leave behind are no less transformative, all the same. In fact, I would argue that all of our progress as a society depends on such people. As George Bernard Shaw once asserted,
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
Or woman. Speaking of, I’ve always loved this quote from Annie Dillard, as she speaks to this call, this stirring in us all, to follow the track of your own truest self, even at the risk of the whole enterprise collapsing all around you.
“We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—even of silence—by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse…I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.” — Annie Dillard
If I were to say my passion for coaching was about anything, it is about that — helping people find within themselves that “one necessity,” and to learn how to follow its wild path every day as they negotiate with or against whoever it is the world wants them to be.
If you’re serious about following your “one necessity” in this season of life, drop me a line. I’d love to help.
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