Initial Draft Of A Chapter Of My Upcoming Book:
Sing The Song Only You Can Sing:
The Gentle Arts Of Living And Creating On Your Own Terms
. . .
What is your objective?
What is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Setting your life’s objectives is surprisingly difficult. Knowing yourself is surprisingly difficult.
If you get the objectives right, a lieutenant can write the strategy.
- General George C. Marshall
As an extreme example of how difficult it is to set an objective, intelligent men have sent thousands of our young men to die, and waste trillions of dollars, to fight wars on the other side of the globe in pursuit of objectives they either hadn’t set or didn’t understand. Or objectives that weren’t practical given the locations and cultures in which they operated.
Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.
- Thoreau, in his journal.
In an interesting way, living life on your own terms requires contributing to the lives of others. Getting everything you can out of life involves giving everything you can. The key questions:
What is the maximum contribution you can make to the lives of others, given your background, skills, experience, personality?
Where does that potential contribution intersect with your area(s) of interest, passion, excitement about life?
To stay with your work, to continue to develop your mastery, you need to stay excited. There are a lot of different elements to that. Your journey won’t be all happiness, all success. There will be difficult times. There may be times when you question what you are doing and why. Discipline and commitment will be required to get you through those times.
I lose my confidence sometimes, and that's where the courage part comes in. I'm only halfway self-confident. . . If you have determination, you're going to use that determination to take the place of confidence.
I was always willing to undergo hardship or whatever it took to be able to stay with my work. I could have quit many times -- given up, because it is no great art in life to be poor and hungry, and that's what I was.
- Erskine Caldwell, novelist, author of Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre, as well as a number of other books. Despite rejection and even scorn early in his writing career, his books ultimately went on to sell tens of millions of copies.
In the end however, determination won’t be enough. You’ll need to create or have some kind of a feedback loop that involves deep satisfaction and joy. You’ll need an inner sense that what you are doing is right. That inner sigh of relief.
For some, wilderness explorers or solitary hermits, for instance, the life objective may be simply be living in harmony with, in constant exposure, to the beauty and mystery of the natural world. For others, as noted below, the satisfaction might come from the triumph over internal demons. For me, somewhat to my surprise because I am a fairly solitary person, I’ve found that I need reinforcement from others to keep my own energy up and maintain my focus. I need people telling me that I’m contributing to their lives. And I need that backed up with a financial transaction. I don’t need a lot of money. I don’t need to be rich. I just need, when people tell me that my work adds to their life, that there be some amount of money, however modest, connected with that feedback. That makes it real. There are a lot of frivolous words encountered on a creative journey. And frivolous people.
That’s me. That may or may not be you. But what is important is that you build a feedback loop, reinforcement into your work, that helps you know that you are on the right track, that reinforces your commitment, your energy. You need to create a circle of both giving and receiving.
There is a power that comes from having a clear understanding of what you want out of life. That leads to focus, and focus (on the right objective) is the ultimate source of creative power. Your objective, your focus, needs to be based on self-knowledge. Truly knowing yourself is not easy. We humans are complicated. We’re bundles of emotion, of desires and fears, internal demons. We’ve all experienced failure, hurt and disappointment. We’ve all experienced success and triumph. On some level, we’re all scared.
...every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again. That is why every man’s story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of every consideration. In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross.
Few people nowadays know what man is. Many sense this ignorance and die the more easily because of it, the same way that I will die more easily once I have completed this story.
I do not consider myself less ignorant than most people. I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me. My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams — like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves.
Each man’s life represents the road toward himself, and attempt at such a road, the intimation of a path. No man has ever been entirely and completely himself. Yet each one strives to become that — one in an awkward, the other in a more intelligent way, each as best he can.
I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.
- Herman Hesse, Demian
What does Hesse mean when he writes that the path that leads to our true selves is distasteful? That path towards self-discovery, toward the truths of our lives, involves developing an understanding of both our strengths and weaknesses, our habits of self-sabotage, of the times we’ve disappointed others and ourselves. That process is not easy. It involves realizations that we may not want to encounter and think about.
Journaling can be helpful in the process of self-discovery. Obstacles to creating the life we want to create include hidden patterns that repeat themselves in our lives, patterns that originate in childhood. Consciously, we may think that the last thing we want is to recreate in our adult lives the dramas and traumas of childhood. Subconsciously, however, there may very likely be a degree of comfort with those dramas. They are familiar. You’ve survived them before so you know, or think you know, that you can survive them again.
And so abused children grow up to be abusers. Or abused children grow up to be abused adults. Those are extreme examples, but the point is that we acquire, in our youth, a degree of comfort with anything we continually experience.
In my adult life I’ve known a number of ex-special forces soldiers, mostly from the British SAS but also ex-American Green Berets and Navy SEALs. One of the common characteristics I’ve noticed is a history of juvenile delinquency, of close scrapes with the law, between the ages of 10 and 18. An impoverished childhood or at least lower middle-class background is also common. Applying the theory that we recreate in our adult lives the drama of our youths, you can see a group of men who, without realizing it, are trying to recreate the danger, close scrapes, and survival pattern. Early in life, they found something they were good at. Transcending victimhood. “Look at me,” a little voice says in the back of their heads, “I’m not helpless anymore.”
Similar patterns can be noticed in the lives of professional boxers. Mike Tyson’s childhood is a particularly profound example. But the real question is, are these tendencies to relive childhood drama and trauma helpful or counter-productive to the lives we actually want to live. To what we want to get out of this precious gift called life.
I had a more or less idyllic childhood up until the age of ten, at which point my father left the military and joined the federal government, ultimately retiring as administrative head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. Up until the age of ten, I spent my available time roaming the woods, marshes and farmlands around our various homes.
After the age of ten, we lived in a middle-class suburb of Ottawa, the capital of Canada. All my schoolmates’ fathers worked for the federal government. They lived in cookie-cutter homes, left for work at the same time, came home from work at the same time, and dreamed of retirement. Their kids were boring, our schoolteachers were boring. I grew increasingly depressed. Between the ages of 11 and 14, I was thrown out of our home or left voluntarily several times. At the age of 15 I left for several months. I left for good at the age of 16.
In my childhood we moved every six to eighteen months. In my adult life I move every couple of years, though I tell myself I hate the packing and time waste. For fifty years I’ve had recurring dreams at night of escaping. The scenarios I escape from differ, but all involve scaling fences and crawling through tunnels with not friendly people or dogs chasing me. The list goes on. All my adult life I’ve been attracted to unstable, unpredictable women. My mother was unstable and unpredictable. But ‘nuff said.
The real point is that the hours I’ve spent journaling about the patterns of my adult life and their similarity to the turmoil in my childhood have helped me come to terms with my life and what I have to offer others. And also helpful has been the journaling and introspection surrounding the deep peace I’ve found escaping to the woods.
In the healing of that wound, which never closes, lies the invented, strange qualities of a man’s work.
- Lorca
Joseph Campbell admonished us to follow our bliss. At least a part of that should be where or when in life we’ve each found peace, deep satisfaction with who we are and what we are doing. I found my bliss, my deep peace, in nature. But also know your demons, and put careful thought into whether or not they are accompanying you, and replicating, in your adult life.
What we call fate does not come to us from outside; it goes forth from within us.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
Chic Scott, mountain guide and author, in response to my question: “What advice do you give or would you give to a twenty-year-old wondering about life’s choices?”
You need to have a great sense of yourself. It’s not ego. Ego has to do more with pride, and what you think of yourself. But a sense of yourself, knowing that you are an individual and that you have freewill. I woke up one morning and knew who I was. I knew what I wanted. What my role was in life. What I was meant to do. Who I was. What I wanted. How to get it. Those are the hard problems in life. Most people don’t even begin to reach those problems.
The ancient Greeks used to say, "Know thyself." So that’s the first step. Get to know your strengths, your weaknesses, your desires. Your inner workings. Your principles. Know everything about yourself. Then know what you want. So many people have no idea what they really want. It takes years and years of scraping away the layers of self-deception. To get down to the bone and find out what you really want out of life. What you want out of yourself. What you really want out of other people. I finally got to that point, and not only that, but I had a pretty good idea how to get it.
So try to find who you really are. It’s not a mountain climber, or a fisherman, or a golfer or a businessman. Those are names, those are jobs. Those are activities. That is not who you are. You have to get right with your soul and find out what you love, what you believe in, what you are afraid of, what you really care about and what your dreams are and what your aspirations are. That is the first thing. Know who you are and what you want. Then you will probably have a pretty good inkling of how to get it. Then life gets simple. But it takes incredible honesty. Brutal honesty. It’s not easy at all. But it is eventually satisfying.
I once spent three or four days by myself at a friends cabin. I found it very interesting. There were no distractions and I wouldn’t allow myself to read a book or turn on the radio. I wouldn’t listen to music. I wanted to discover silence and I wanted to discover my own thought process. I did a little bit. It was like opening a little box and seeing this incredible treasure chest of riches and demons and all sorts of things. I would either be sleeping or sitting in front of the fire relaxing. You keep wanting to pick up a book. You just keep wanting to do something to distract you. Every five minutes I had to grab myself and say, “No, you are not going to read a book. No, you are not going to find a magazine. Sit. Just sit. No, you are not going to write a letter. Just sit.” Eventually I reached a point where I just sat. I started watching the thoughts come through my mind. I started watching myself think. Exploring.
In addition to the patterns of self-sabotage, the unhelpful patterns, your process of discovery needs to examine carefully what’s worked. When have others told you that you’ve made a major, positive difference in their lives? During periods when everything has come together in your life, what were you doing, thinking, risking?
Also worth thinking through: what were the dreams of your youth before the world in all of its complexity entered your planning, your concept of what is possible in life. Before the bombardment of marketing messages trying to tell you what you should want, before parents and others tried to steer you in the directions that make them feel better about the directions they threw their own life into? Or threw it away into?
People who go through the process of discovering their own truth and learning to trust it develop certain qualities. Perseverance. An impatience with hype. A capacity for self-reflection. Another one is openness: not the kind of openness that flaps with every wind, but an open-mindedness that seems natural when you trust yourself enough to listen to others and not lose your sense of direction.
- Mary FordThe advice of the poet: “Keep true to the dreams of thy youth.”
― Friedrich von SchillerThere’s a single definition of success. Look at yourself in the mirror, in the evening, and wonder if you would disappoint the person you were at eighteen. Before you got corrupted by life. Let him or her be the only judge. Not your reputation. Not your wealth. Not your standing in the community. Not the decorations on your lapel.
If you do not feel ashamed, then you are successful. All other definitions of success are fragile modern constructions.
- Nassim Taleb - 11 Rules For Life
How To Determine The Identity Of Any Person
Socrates demonstrated long ago that the only truly free individual is free to the extent of his self-mastery. Those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.
- Steven Pressfield from The War of Art
Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk, poet, and author. He wrote several books and countless articles on spirituality and religion (both Christian and Buddhist), politics, and literature.
In one (My Argument With the Gestapo), published after his death in 1968, Merton hunts for his inner self in the bombed out sections of London and occupied France, and avoids the Nazis by going right into their midst. Later he is interrogated by British Intelligence:
“If you want to identify me,” he says to the British officers who are questioning him, "ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for. Between these two answers, you can determine the identity of any person. The better answer he has, the more of & a person he is . . . I am all the time trying to make out the answer as I go on living. I live out the answer to my two questions myself and the answers may not be complete, even when my life is ended I may go on working out the answer for a long time after my death, but at least it will be resolved, and there will be no further question, for with God's mercy I shall possess not only the answer but the reality that the answer was about.” (The officer rolls his eyes in despair.)
Imagine your life as a person. Imagine a friend, someone who knows you well and loves you deeply, and who wishes only the best for you. Ask that person, imaginary or real, the questions below. If the answers you get back are uncomfortable, that’s good.
Journaling Questions
What are you living for?
What do you want to live for?
What is keeping you from living fully for what you want to live for?
Looking back, what were the most deeply satisfying periods of your life, when you felt who you are was in harmony with how you lived, when you felt a deep peace in your life?
Somewhat related, though only tangentially, for those engaged in creative work:
How would you describe your creative work?
If your creative work was everything you think it could be, how differently would you be describing it?
What is keeping you from creating that potential?
What does it feel like to remember your soul's task?
When the deepest part of you becomes engaged in what you are doing, when your activities and actions become gratifying and purposeful, when what you do serves both yourself and others, when you do not tire within but seek the sweet satisfaction of your life and your work, you are doing what you were meant to be doing. The personality that is engaged in the work of its soul is buoyant. It is not burdened with negativity. It does not fear. It experiences purposefulness and meaning. It delights in its work and in others. It is fulfilled and fulfilling.
- from The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav.Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
-Mary Oliver, The Summer Day
If you really know what things you want out of life, it's amazing how opportunities will come to enable you to carry them out.
- John GoddardNever look down to test the ground before taking your next step. Only he who keeps his eye on the far horizon shall find his right road.
- Dag Hammarskjold from his diary