Gifts of the journey

Reframing my misspent youth

As sometimes happens to absolutely all of us, I woke up one morning last spring and set about the important task of doubting my life decisions and comparing myself with everyone else. Ruing the various sub-decisions that resulted in my not buying a property in the 90s or the 2000’s, and even finally in the 10’s, I launched into various well known routines about the foolishness of my choices, noting as usual how I was doomed to eternal frustration.

Luckily one of the byproducts of habitual worrying about the past is that part of you eventually gets bored, realising in a dim way that no good has ever resulted, nor ever will. (One of my favourite quotes of all time: “Forgiveness: giving up all hope of a better past”).

So as I was about to roll over into this puddle of familiar psychic mud something new happened: my brain started questioning its own account of the past.

This wasn’t because I had read somewhere that this was a good thing to do - of course it’s a good thing to do. Instead, after years of behaving badly something in my neurouniverse just loosened up; a weary and illuminated corner of my brain decided to let go.

And so it was that I asked myself if it was really true that I had misspent my thirties in leaving full time work, writing books, dabbling in stand up comedy and traveling India instead of, say, returning to McKinsey & Co or Private Equity or starting a tech unicorn. Or if in fact my oversoul had some kind of a plan or intention that ultimately would create equivalent value for myself and the world.

Reassessing the narrative of your life is an important undertaking - especially the story of your middle years. Once used your thirties never come back. The importance of this decade is almost impossible to estimate until you’re done with it. It is the engine room of life, an unrepeatable confluence of energy and experience with relatively ample time. You’ve got to use it well. Or to put it more kindly, you’re going to use it how you’re going to use it.

There’s risk in any direction: Having done an MBA, I understood the opportunity cost of stepping out of the business world but I considered it worth the risk. I actually thought I might make more money that way, à la P Diddy or Jimmy Carr. Within only a few years I started to reap the (inverse) rewards. It soon became clear that creativity was a long game - a game potentially stretching many lifetimes, perhaps beyond the heat death of the universe. I was fond of musing that I had personally destroyed millions of dollars of shareholder value - my own - in the space of a decade.

But what about the value created?

It’s only with hindsight that I start to be able to piece together the full meaning of having walked a less linear path. Moments of reflection on the arc of my life - of a rare idle morning - start to yield the realisation that something actually happened, rather than nothing, and that that something was more than worthwhile:

The adventures of my 30s - some of them cataclysmic failures - trained me in a completely new way of looking at things. This new way of being I learned, and the mistakes I unlearned, added up cumulatively to a reverse life car crash. In other words, they saved me decades of angst.

I picked up some great stories along the way, too.

It takes time to get used to a new world view, and in many ways I’m still adapting to this one; I’m still bargaining and resisting the implications. But as they say: once you’ve been there, there’s no going back.

So for my benefit as much as yours, here is my best summary of what I think I learned:

1. At some point while writing my book about optimism – which was a search for good news about the world and reasons to feel positive about the future - I started to grasp the idea that there is a layer of reality that lies beyond emotion and external conditions, a sort of ‘zero space’ that is more relaxed, open and real than our apparent reality. I was told versions of this repeatedly by many of the people I interviewed (including Desmond Tutu who kept shouting: “I am not an optimist!”) until I sort of got it. I had already been doing a spiritual practice for some years, but somehow it was only around this time that it started to penetrate my understanding.

2. At first I experienced this space like a force of gravity that wanted to drag my attention and energy away from achieving things in the normal way. Eventually it became more powerful. Over time I realised there is a part of me that will do anything to get me to that place and is completely uninterested in my conscious goals of achievement, belonging and status. This inner drive is more interested in my freedom than in my apparent comfort or happiness - meaning, it will dismantle anything that stands in its way for too long: career, relationships, life habits that don’t work.

3. Slowly I understood its MO: things would be challenging or go wrong in my life and I would be forced to confront certain beliefs and emotions inside me that I would do anything to avoid but that, with a bit of courage, I could touch, unravel and shed towards becoming a fuller version of myself. These clusters of feeling and belief were nested inside me in layers, like geological strata, under the surface of conscious thought, until they were forced into my awareness.

4. It gradually became clear that this unravelling was the real storyline of my life, sometimes converging with but mainly digressing from the movie I usually thought I was starring in. The arc of this real movie is a journey from stress to ease, from idiot to guru, from doer to strategist, from victim to player. It’s a happier ending but a less conventional one. There’s a catch, though. To live in this ‘more real’ reality one has to let go or give up on achieving things in the normal way.

5. But it turns out it’s all worth it because - as I eventually discovered - once I’d got the hang of stopping and unravelling things whenever I felt too stressed, life started to flow more easily. It became apparent that beneath the alertness and vigilance of my self-protecting mind were forces of creativity waiting to express themselves in forms I couldn’t possibly imagine in advance, but which were always perfect for the moment (eg ideas, insights, impulses).

6. And the creativity wasn’t just in me. The more I released these beliefs, fears and anxieties, the more I noticed things starting to organise themselves in the outside world in ways which were always optimal so long as I didn’t stand in their way. Underneath that sat the knowing, somehow in my very bones, that good things happen in a very particular and mysterious way when I’m relaxed and deeply at ease. I started to trust this strange, backwards causality. Oh, and I could feel things now too, instead of being scared of feeling; I suddenly had EQ.

7. Similarly, as this work progressed, I started to notice that others around me and the world itself - even the most hateful, annoying or challenging aspects - reflected parts of my own personality past and present, resolved and unresolved. I started to feel one with the world of people. I realised we were all in the same boat, navigating the same hall of mirrors.

8. Finally, all this felt like a tremendously exciting discovery that contained the seeds of a completely new way of operating that promised peace, happiness and success - even if my ability to deliver on this was continually hampered by my obstreperous busyness and status anxiety.

I fail to live up to the promise of this all the time. I can never quite grasp the whole of it with my mind or pin it down to repeatable formulas of action (although I tried! I tried so many times…) and can only reconnect with it in moments of quietness.

I’ve also had to adapt this new way of looking at things to the hard physics of real life, the need for daily decision making and rigour as well as intuition and ‘flow skills’.

All of which probably makes me a Taoist.

I am not alone in this way of looking at things. Plenty of others, from Plato to David Bohm, have noticed that life - when observed closely and not skirted over at a million miles an hour - behaves something like a mindblowingly complex 4D simulation: a game, with very specific rules designed to move us towards freedom.

Here’s Bill Hicks’ way of expressing it:

But it wasn't until I started working with leaders and organisations in my 40s that I began to recognise the concrete value of these intuitions: that this inner work is not a luxury but is the essence of good leadership - and that leadership itself is a quality that is universal and agnostic of any external context. In other words, people who are parents and people who are teachers and people who are CEOs all face exactly the same structural issues.

In that sense, everyone has to do it. Which is why my offerings to the world today are all about navigating that nutty journey - with style and enjoyment when possible.

So much for what I learned. What about you? How has the arc of your story changed the way you look at the world? And how have your mistakes been the portals through which a new reality burned?

I hope they have: Our choices reflect the deeper patterns of our being - patterns which are often obscure to our own conscious understanding. The gifts that come as a result are perfectly tailored to our needs, and perfectly uninterested in received narratives of happiness. Or so I see it.

So take heart.

Thank you for reading.

Laurence

PS - for those interested in rigorous philosophical and neuro-scientific explanations for the Bill Hicks view of life, I can recommend Bernard Kastrup's body of work on 'Analytic Idealism' (www.bernardokastrup.com) and of course the Tao Tse Ching.

PPS - I finally bought a house. Last November. Whole other story.

www.laurenceshorter.com