We all have our places where we find wisdom. For example, my ma occasionally sends me insightful nuggets of knowledge from Hollywood celebrities. This source is interesting to me because it’s not a place that I’d normally look to for guidance…but as I write this, I ask myself how much of that celebrity aversion is due to biases crafted by media empires who profit from their exploitation? There’s a good chance that, being so successful, celebrities have some strong qualities that we can learn from, right? I digress; sorry but I can’t resist the opportunity to narrate thought processes around expectation. Anyway the point is that it’s good to be open, as sometimes you’ll find bangers like the following in unexpected places. As someone transitioning careers mid-life, this woke me up like a slap in the face:
“When you create yourself to make it, you’re going to have to either let that creation go, and take a chance on being loved or hated for who you really are, or you’re going to have to kill who you really are, and fall into your grave grasping onto a character that you never were.”
Wh- wh- whaaattt? Buuutttt, but…Ohhhhhh shhhiiiiittttttttt
Who Are You Really Working For?
Wow. When I review my career, it feels like I’ve lived a lifetime of playing the character I needed to play in order to get the job done, losing myself in the process. It was never meant to be permanent, but it never is. I know I’m not alone in this. Life comes at you, things snowball quickly, and before you know it we are defined as the character rather than the person inside, first to others and then eventually to ourselves.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to fall into my grave grasping onto a character that I never was. In fact that sounds like an awful fate. But it also sounds like a clarion call, to all of us: Find the person who you want to be, and let that person grow. Love that person, and the seeds that once seemed so miniscule and pitiful will flourish. You will find what you’re looking for when you stop searching so desperately. We don’t need to give up on the possibility that people will love us for who we are, warts and all.
Case in point, the person who said those words spent a lifetime cultivating acceptance through being who he thought he needed to be, and was quite successful doing so. But all the success in the world never filled his heart, and he realized that he’d been looking in all the wrong places. He’d been viewing the world through the lens of fear, fear of rejection, of failure. It was only with the realization that he’d never find what he was looking for until he put the mask away that he found a sense of ease, of peace with life. That man was Jim Carrey, and yes I’m sorry for The Mask reference.
You see, I might have filtered my earlier reaction (the “oh shit” following the quote) for fear of how it would be received, who I’d possibly turn off. And I’ve spent a lifetime doing that, of fighting back the real me in favor of acceptance, of being seen how I needed to be seen in order to get the job done. Now sometimes it can make sense to do this. In nonprofit advocacy efforts, for example, we must “play the game” in order to have a conversation. The problem occurs when you let this mindset bleed over into your daily life without your intention, when it affects how you write your tiny little blog that no one reads. This happens quickly and seamlessly.
And so I decided to keep that emotional language, because that’s my actual reaction to that quote. It felt like a punch to the gut, and I wanted to convey that in an authentic way.
I think this is a struggle that most of us face at some point in our lives, finding the balance between how we present ourselves to the world and how we really are. We get caught up in the high speed traffic of life and lose sight of the off-ramp to our deeper wisdom. We forget what matters and we become the game, instead of playing it at the times that we must and returning to a home base of who we are. Life becomes the traffic, stopping and going, stopping and going, stopping and going.
Keep Doing What Matters To You
To help us keep perspective in this nonstop game of life, I bet you didn’t think you’d be turning to Matthew McConaughey, but here we are. Below he speaks about the need to figure out what success means to you, and how important it is to check the status of this throughout your life, lest you end up off course spending your time on a bunch of junk that doesn’t matter:
“What is your definition of success? For me, it’s a measurement of five things. Fatherhood, being a good husband, health (mind body spirit), career, friendships. These are the things that are important in my life right now. So I try to measure these five things each day, I check in with them, see if I’m in the debit section or the credit section. If one’s rolling but the other’s flailing, adjust. If you don’t keep maintenance on them, one’s gonna get weak, gonna get sick, die.
Whatever your version of success is, don’t choose anything that would jeopardize yourself. Prioritize who you are, who you want to be, and don’t spend time with anything that antagonizes your character. Don’t drink the kool-aid, it tastes sweet but you will get cavities tomorrow.”
Most of us start drinking the kool-aid and never stop. The kool-aid takes many forms, be it food, drugs, sex, or the seemingly endless righteous anger at the world around us. It’s not the end of the world if we occasionally take a taste, in fact it’s hard not to in modern society. Sometimes we do what we have to do until we’ve healed ourselves and are in a position to develop better strategies. But often that last important step never comes, we get hit again and again and we’re always recovering and recovering and recovering and before you know it we’ve lost sight of our true baseline.
Now if that’s happened to you, don’t worry, there is always a path forward. We can use this newfound awareness to be cognizant of what we’re doing, and not go back to the well of poisons too often. Don’t sleep on this. Every choice matters. This is a matter of life or death, of living your true life or surrendering to the facade that you clench with white knuckles until you meet your final moments on this earth.
Take a moment or a few and go through the exercise that McConaughey recommends above. See where you’re at, take stock of things, and regularly check in. As my man Arnold would say, “Do it! Do it now!”
Relating To Your Struggles
When you check your status, it probably won’t all be sunshine and rainbows. Working to find the real you can be difficult and discouragement will rear its head from time to time. It’s ok, it’s expected, you know this will happen, you know it will pass. Like everything I talk about in this blog, the concepts here are simple but not easy. You will fail, you will fail over, and over, and over. Get over your fear of failure. Get over your fear of hard work. If you put in the time, you will reap the rewards, and there’s nothing sweeter than living a life that embodies what is, in you, at this moment.
Life can’t all be easy wins. In fact if we just won all the time that would be pretty boring, and we wouldn’t see much improvement. Remember Arnold’s words:
“Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength.”
As you go through hard times in your life, don’t forget that the real you is working out and getting stronger, and all of your efforts will pay off in the long run. On top of being stronger, you’ll more clearly see all you have to be thankful and joyful about in life, and that simply cannot be bought. Gratitude breeds acceptance, which helps you comfortably settle into who you really are, and so it all becomes a self-fulfilling process.
Yet despite this truth, we tend to fight for what’s comfortable in the moment. We resist.
Embrace The Change And Break The Cycle
Bringing this all home is Buddhist nun “celebrity” Pema Chodron. In “The Places That Scare You,” she writes:
“When someone asks me how I got involved with Buddhism, I always say it was because I was so angry with my husband. The truth is he saved my life. When that marriage fell apart, I tried hard—very, very hard—to go back to some kind of comfort, some kind of security, some kind of familiar resting place. Fortunately for me, I could never pull it off. Instinctively I knew that annihilation of my old dependent, clinging self was the only way to go.”
Whether it’s a failed marriage or something else in your life that isn’t working, most of us desperately grasp at what we think we had while missing the truth of opportunity through the clouds. It’s understandable, as we’re trying to deal with the pain of change and we fear the unknown, but it’s imperative that we look at the components of our lives and ask if we are clinging. The more we can let go and open up to what comes, the more we’re able to embody our true selves, the more we can progress on the path with wisdom and compassion.
We must release any attachment we have to the ideal of a perfect life. If we stay open to the truth of what is, we develop the foundation for being our authentic self and for living and loving each moment on our path. This is the way.
I’ll close with Chodrin’s sage guidance from a different one of her books, “When Things Fall Apart”:
“Many of us prefer practices that will not cause discomfort, yet at the same time we want to be healed. But bodhichitta (open heart) training doesn’t work that way. A warrior accepts that we can never know what will happen to us next. We can try to control the unpredictable by looking for security and predictability, always hoping to be comfortable and safe. But the truth is that we can never avoid uncertainty. This not knowing is part of the adventure [. . .]
When things fall apart and we’re on the verge of we know not what, the test for each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize. The spiritual journey is not about heaven and finally getting to a place that’s really swell. In fact, that way of thinking is what keeps us miserable. Thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly.”
Come, break the cycle with me. The water’s fine.
Really good read!!