Dear Friends and Colleagues,
Happy Spring! I am hoping this month’s issue finds
you celebrating this greening season with all of its
blossoming beauty. Springtime gives us a visual display
of new beginnings – the fruit trees with its young buds,
new shoots of green appearing on the bush or sprouting
from the ground. While the whole world erupts in
colorful renewal and resurrection, may you be so moved
to flower in the garden that is uniquely yours.
Our lives, however, do not necessarily mirror the
unfolding of the earth’s seasons. Human life is not
nearly as predictable as the life of the earth. Some of
you or the people you serve may be experiencing what
feels like a true springtime in your life – feeling
fresh, vital and alive in your life and work! Others may
be in the chaotic throes of transition, or in a quiet
period of unknowing what or where you should be going or
doing next. Such is the nature of human life in general,
and livelihood in particular - never stagnant, always
changing, frequently fraught with new choices to be
made, unprepared-for circumstances to respond to, and
perennial questions to be pondered, such as:
• What do I want to be when I grow up?
• What should I be doing, studying, or applying for?
• Can I leave the security of a job for something
that may not turn out?
• How do I follow my bliss when I don’t know what it
is?
• What color is my parachute?
• What are my choices and how do I know which path to
take?
We are familiar with these questions - this place of
unknowing. We recognize it not only as the place we
started from, but as a place we return to again and
again throughout the journey of our work lives. Antoine
De Saint Exupery once noted that to live is to be slowly
born. How true this is in the area of our ever-evolving
vocation!
One of the great disservices we do to young people is
that we let them believe what we once believed – that a
career is a destination, a place of arrival after
careful planning. You just have to decide what you want
to be when you grow up, research the steps you need to
take, go through the motions of your career plan, pass
go, collect your $200, and “Voila” – you too get to live
happily ever after. I think I can count on one hand the
people I have met in my life whose work lives unfolded
in such a reasonable, logical and predictable manner –
and they are all over seventy years old! My father is
one of them. He was born and raised in the economy that
espoused and supported the idea of “Getting a good job,
working your way up and staying there until retirement”.
While the reality of today’s work world clearly does not
support such thinking, little has changed in our
mentality.
What might be a healthier and more helpful
perspective is embracing our work lives as a journey
rather than a destination. This distinction is critical
and carries deep implications for how we see and
experience our work lives, among them the following five
changes in perspective:
1. There is no “right job” or “wrong job” – there’s
just the job you’re in and what you do with it!
Thinking of work as a destination puts enormous and
unnecessary pressure on the job seeker to make the
“right” choice and to avoid the “wrong” one. After all,
who wants to end up in a dead-end job? When we accept
that livelihood is a journey, however, we accept each
stage we as just that – a stage. Inherent in the concept
of a journey is that it continues. We are never stuck
and there is no such thing as a dead-end! The question
that must be asked at each and every point is, “How do I
give the most I have to give in this situation, reap the
fullest benefit I can, and move forward from here?” From
this perspective, we would translate “right job” to “a
place I want to stay and nurture” and “wrong job” with
“a place I want to learn and move on from to the next
place on the journey”. To a great extent career
development is a process of elimination – learning from
every job what you want more of and less of – each
opportunity adding to your own growing sense of true
livelih ood. In this sense, every place on the journey
“belongs” – regardless of whether or not we enjoyed it!
2. We don't need a "grand vision" as much as we need
“enough vision” to take the next step.
My seventeen-year-old daughter recently shared her
deep anxiety about the fact that she doesn’t yet know
what she wants to do for a living! Because I am her
mother, I failed at conveying anything meaningful that
could possibly assuage her teenage angst. What I hope,
however, is that someone with perhaps more clout, will
succeed in communicating to her that she need not
concern herself with the “grand vision of her life” –
she just needs to listen, learn, and pay attention to
her inclinations, desires, passions and values that are
speaking to her wherever she happens to be at that time
of her life!
My daughter, like all of us, will grow into her
knowing. She will make many small choices that lead to
new choices – all of them culminating in what looks like
a “grand vision” – only to be seen and understood in
retrospect. And even then, God bless her, she will face
new choices about the next step to be taken …
Wouldn’t it be nice if our children were not saddled
with the same charade of having to appear as if they
always know where they are going? What if they could
just relax in the “unknowing”, confident that their path
indeed has a purpose which they will come to understand
and hone through choices they make? And yet, regardless
of the choices we make, sometimes our lives seem to live
us, as if they possess their own bizarre momentum. We
may set out on a journey of our own making, but in the
end, our experience is finally determined by the journey
itself.
What if we could, instead, instill in young people a
trust and confidence in the journey that will be their
life? What if they could cultivate a trust in themselves
and confidence in their own sense of character? Trust in
their ability to make the journey of livelihood will
come from having a deep understanding not of “what” they
want to be, but “who” they want to be!
3. The question “What to do I want to be when I grow
up?” can be replaced with “Who do I want to be at this
stage of my livelihood?”
What does “grown up” mean anyway? When does that
happen? What does that look like? Personally, I hope to
continue to grow in ways deeper, truer and finer
throughout my life – at every stage gleaning a new
horizon that will be worthy of my abilities, purpose,
energy and vision at that time. I would hate to have to
decide now what I should be doing when I am 50 or 60 or
70 years old because I have no idea what I will have
experienced and learned by then, much less what my
choices will be.
The vital question at each juncture of our journey
becomes “Who” do I want to be at this stage of my life,
not “What” do I want to be for the rest of my life. With
this change in perspective we ponder the options before
us from a landscape of new questions: What do I most
deeply care about? What do I most highly value at this
time? Who am I becoming? What principles and truths are
guiding my actions and choices? How do I wish to live?
With a change in focus from what do I want “to be” to
what qualities and attributes do I wish to develop, hone
and cultivate at this next stage of my livelihood –
everything changes. Choices are easier to make because
there is a new basis upon which to make them. If a
person has discerned that a sense of wholeness and joy
is what is paramount at this stage in his livelihood,
his options will be weighed in terms of their ability to
add or detract from his wholeness and joy. Deciding
“who” we are and “who” we wish to become may be the most
important vocational questions of all!
4. We can gain a sense of control on the journey by
making character-based choices.
Ralph Waldo Emerson wisely reminds us, “What lies
beyond us and what lies before us are tiny matters
compared to what lies within us.” Making choices based
on questions of inner character allows us to shape a
life of our own making rather than being at the whim of
the work world. The work opportunities that lie beyond
us and those that lie before us matters little compared
to what we carry within us to any and all opportunities!
Because we do not have control over our external
circumstances, we need to cultivate a strong sense of
control internally. Committed to peace and fairness,
even in the face of discrimination, we will know how to
act. Committed to life and work balance, we bring our
own set of boundaries even to the workplace that does
not set them for you. With a high value on
lightheartedness and fun, we will bring those eyes and
find the levity in even the most dire of circumstances.
In this sense, our future is never completely
unpredictable, because we are bringing what we can count
on to be unchanging – our own sense of conviction and
character!
5. Choose the path with heart!
We all know that underneath our best-laid plans and
expectations, despite all the professional and personal
advice both offered and thrust upon us from everyone in
this and the next area code, the next step for each of
us in our livelihood is truly unknown and has never been
taken by anyone. Our challenge, then, is to maintain the
spirit of an explorer, a pilgrim on the great journey!
There lives in each of us an exciting, adventurous
sense of the possible, a yearning to move forward into
the unknown in order to embrace life in all its
fullness. This spark is divine and essential to human
life. Perhaps, above all else, that is what the journey
of life and work is about – the unfolding of the human
heart and the human spirit. Little wonder, then, that
each of our paths is unique and distinctive. Little
wonder that that though everyone who has ever lived has
journeyed, no one, not a single person, has ever
traveled your particular road. Others may have met with
similar circumstances or traveled similar roads, but no
one has ever felt the dust under your particular feet.
And while the roads we travel are distinctive and
individual, there is one piece of advice that I believe
holds universal truth. This is an excerpt from Carlos
Castaneda who has penned several rich and inspiring
books about the spiritual journey through the voice of
his teacher, Don Juan. I shared this passage in my book,
“The Wholehearted Journey” and I am happy for the
opportunity to share it again in closing this month’s
newsletter:
“All paths are the same: they lead nowhere….There are
paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my
own life I could I have traversed long, long paths but I
am not anywhere. My benefactor’s question has meaning
now. Does this path have heart? If it does, the path is
good; if it doesn’t, it is of no use. Both paths lead
nowhere; but one has a heart, and the other doesn’t. One
makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it,
you are one with it. The other will make you curse your
life. Once makes you strong, the other weakens you.
Choose, always, the path with heart.”
Wishing you joy on the journey,
Denise
© Denise Bissonnette, April 2004
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