CHAPTER 7
The Freedom of the Road
What’s It All About?
The theme song of the 1970s cult movie, Alfie, asks “What’s It All About?” Think of the tune as an anthem for everyone who seeks a reason for being — a reason “to get up in the morning.” In the face of bewildering change and endless transition, more people than ever before are hungry for a feeling that they matter. We find ourselves looking for what Viktor Frankl wrote about in Man’s Search for Meaning: a clear sense of what we were put on this planet to do and to be.
As its title suggests, Man’s Search for Meaning is written for anyone interested in what it means to live a meaningful life. In this classic work, inspired by his suffering and survival in the Holocaust, Frankl explains how anyone can find meaning in life, no matter what their circumstances, and why even a life of unbearable pain can be meaningful. In our current era of crisis and uncertainty, as people increasingly begin to reimagine their lives, Frankl’s work seems newly relevant.
Frankl writes eloquently of what he calls “tragic optimism,” the human condition in which we all find ourselves as we realize that life inevitably brings pain, guilt, and death, and yet, for the most part, we still manage to carry on. It’s a poignant example of life reimagined, as Frankl encourages us to turn suffering into achievement, relying on guilt to improve ourselves, and using the knowledge that life is short as a spur to meaningful action.
Half a century later, this sort of tragic optimism — often expressed as “resilience” — has become a key theme in the increasingly influential field of positive psychology, the study of the gifts and passions that enable individuals to live thriving and meaningful lives. Rather than focusing on self-esteem, regardless of achievement, positive psychology emphasizes the ability to be resilient in the face of life’s setbacks — and for that matter, successes as well. This is perfectly consistent with Frankl’s approach to the coping mechanisms he employed in order to survive his concentration camp experience. He found meaning in his experience of the Holocaust by taking the opportunity to not only observe others in unimaginably desperate situations, but also to reframe and make use of those insights himself.
Reimagining one’s life means learning how to reframe information to find other ways of looking at our thoughts and options. In another of his books, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, Frankl gives the example of an older man devastated by the loss of his wife. The man is angry that she died first, leaving him alone and despairing in old age. Frankl advises him to reframe the situation and think of his living longer in different terms. The man has saved his beloved from experiencing the grief that he is now experiencing; he should consider reframing his loss as a gift to the person he adored most in the world.
Perhaps the part of Frankl’s message most relevant to our book is his perspective on the challenge of living meaningfully. He often spoke of the choice between taking a job that pays well and one that brings your life meaning. For Richard, this particular dilemma has special relevance; in 1968, after meeting Frankl in person, he ultimately chose a lifework path of meaning.
In the “new normal” global climate of endless change and instability, Frankl’s insights have lessons for us all. He was convinced that even when every bit of control appears to have been taken away from us (such as, in his case, when facing death in a concentration camp), it is still possible for human beings to find meaning. And although hopefully, none of us will ever experience such horror, we do know how it feels, in the contemporary world, to be subject to forces far beyond our control. The “existential vacuum” of modern life challenges us endlessly to seek out and find meaning. As we attempt to reimagine our lives in a time when isolation is increasing and trust is eroding, Frankl’s advice resonates powerfully, as he encourages us to find shared meaning in a new sense of community and common purpose.
At its most basic level, Frankl’s message is about compassion, a quality he embodied throughout his life. For instance, he had the opportunity to leave Vienna before the war, but chose to stay behind in spite of the risks, to care for his parents. His own tragic experiences could have led him to dismiss as trivial ordinary complaints about the meaninglessness of the safe lives most of us lead. Instead, he understood clearly that any of us can feel lonely, isolated, and hungry for meaning, no matter what our situation. As a consequence he put his insights into practice in his own life, by devoting himself to helping others embark on their own search for meaning. His aspiration for each of us was that we find our own way, and reimagine our own lives as meaningful.
We are drawn from Frankl’s overall search for meaning into his deeper, more personalized question, from “What is the meaning of life?” to “What is the meaning of my life?” We might pose the question in two additional ways: “What gets you up in the morning?” And “What keeps you awake at night?” And then, of course, the all-important follow-up: “Are you fulfilling your life’s purpose?”
Poet Mary Oliver asks it this way: “What will you do with your one wild and precious life?” How many among us are, indeed, living up to those wild and precious possibilities? How many are exercising their courage and curiosity on a regular basis?
This is pioneering territory. After all, no one really wants to live a totally wild and crazy life. That will only lead to suffering. And besides, we think, we’re already living good lives. We’re generous — at least with our families and friends. We care about making a difference in the world. We don’t fail more than anyone else we know. We’re good-hearted, and we’re doing our best.
But still … could there be something more? Can we look a little deeper? What really is the “good life”? And how does it differ from just a pretty good one?
One thing is quite extraordinary: and that’s how ordinary are most of the so-called good lives we’ve studied. The closer you look at these ordinary lives, the more extraordinary they appear.
Two American Dreams
There are two American dreams, and they seem diametrically opposed to each other. The first is about freedom, liberty, and the lure of the new frontier. The second is about safety, security, and a home of one’s own. The first dream is about the excitement of the road. The second dream is about the security of the hearth.
Both versions of the dream have powerful appeal. Both are deeply ingrained in our national psyche. Together, both are the cake we eat and want to have, too.
Most of us constantly go back and forth between them. One moment, all we want is the sky over our heads and a quiet place for shelter. The next, we feel we’ve got to be looking at that sky through the skylight of a brand-new home.
We’re told by millions of advertisements for thousands of products that we can have it all. But the fact is, many of us don’t even know what “it” is!
For years, we’ve been asking people to define the “good life.” No matter what their income, most say that if they only had twice as much as they currently have, they’d be set. They’d have fulfilled the promise of the Declaration of Independence — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But when they achieve that new level, they’re still not fulfilled. It turns out they’d been pursuing unhappiness all along.
Ultimately, it all comes back down to a question of how to define the good life. What is it for you? Freedom or Security?
In Isak Dinesen’s classic book, Out of Africa, Karen Blixen and Denys Finch-Hatton have a conversation that brings out the tension between freedom and security, between the desire to settle down and be married and the desire for the freedom of the road.
Karen confronts Denys with her knowledge that when he goes away, he doesn’t always go on safari. He admits this is true, but insists that it’s not meant to hurt her. She responds that nevertheless, it still does hurt, to which he replies:
Karen, I’m with you because I choose to be with you. I don’t want to live someone else’s idea of how to live. Don’t ask me to do that. I don’t want to find out one day that I’m at the end of someone else’s life. I’m willing to pay for mine, to be lonely sometimes, to die alone if I have to. I think that’s fair.
Karen answers that it isn’t fair at all. Because by his actions, he’s asking her to pay as well.
And this, of course, is much of the struggle when it comes to resolving questions of freedom and security. None of us live in a vacuum. Our actions and attitudes are completely interconnected with the actions and attitudes of others. Unlike Denys Finch-Hatton, most of us find that the option simply to go away — whether on safari or not — does not openly present itself. Yet at the same time, Finch-Hatton characterizes, albeit to an extreme, what many of us yearn for in our lives. We’re looking for a way to ensure that we don’t end up living someone else’s life. We’re looking for new frontiers, new adventures, new places where — at least for a little while — we can feel free.
Unfortunately, most of us, in most of our working lives, are driven by deadlines. Product release dates. Fiscal year ends. Final notices. It’s no wonder they call them “deadlines,” because, as many people feel, it’s deadlines that are killing them!
Is there any escape? We can’t really put our foot down and bring everything to a grinding halt, can we?
In the conclusion of his masterpiece, Walden, Henry David Thoreau tells a story about an artist in the city of Kouroo who sets out to make the perfect walking staff. Understanding that into a perfect work, time does not enter, he says to himself, ‘It shall be perfect in all respects, though I do nothing else in my life.’ The artist then, in his ongoing quest for perfection, transcends time. By the time he has found the perfect wood for his staff and shaped it perfectly, eons have passed, leaving no mark upon him or his work. As he puts the finishing touches on his perfect staff, he sees that the lapse of time he once experienced was an illusion. In crafting perfection, he has entered a realm that time cannot touch.
In our own lives, when we let ourselves experience the perfection of the present, we do the same thing. When we’re not exhausted by what has happened or worried about what’s to come, we enter a realm outside — or more appropriately — inside of time. That’s how we know we’ve found the right pace. We’re neither ahead of ourselves or behind. That’s what it means to balance the load — we’re right where we are.
Balancing the four elements of the good life is how we shift our perspective to gain the freedom of the road. Because, as it turns out, it’s not that most of us don’t have enough time, it’s that we don’t have enough of the kind of time we want.
If you know where you want to spend your time — on work, love, place, or purpose — and can allocate it accordingly, you won’t feel so trapped. You’ll feel less weighed down by the demands of your schedule and more in control of where you are headed.
If you find you don’t have enough time, there are basically two things you can do:
• Increase your income to “buy more time,” or …
• Simplify your life to “own more time.”
Duane Elgin points out in Voluntary Simplicity:
We all know where our lives are unnecessarily complicated. We are all painfully aware of the distractions, clutter, and pretense that weigh upon our lives and make our passage through the world more cumbersome and awkward. To live with simplicity is to unburden our lives — to live more direct, unpretentious, and unencumbered relationships with all aspects of our lives: consuming, working, learning, relating and so on.16
Bureau of Honest Admissions,
Department of Walking Your Talk
After making our pitch for simplicity, we as authors need to back up a little and admit that, after all, we both live well by nearly any socio-economic standard. We haven’t any right — nor indeed, any inclination — to suggest that the good life is only to be achieved by divesting oneself of all one’s possessions and making a career of living off alms. Far from it.
Our commitment is to regularly asking ourselves, “How much is enough?”
Simplicity is not a static condition that you can possess. It is an ever-changing art, the art of needing less and being more.
How to bring that art to fruition is a question to be asked over and over again throughout our lives.
Betrayed by Success
At some point in our lives many of us feel trapped. By the time we are in our late thirties or early forties, nearly all of us have become specialists in something — work, parenting, whatever. Because our specialties have consumed, and continue to consume, our time, the underdeveloped parts of ourselves become more obvious.
Carl Jung pointed out that by the time we are 40 or 50 or so, we are bound to feel that our lives are out of balance, merely because we have overfocused our time and neglected parts of ourselves. Our “undiscovered self” yearns to be discovered.
Some of us feel betrayed by our success. Our private thoughts reveal a conflict between staying on the current road or seeking a “road not taken” — a new life direction. We feel confused and unable to sort things out.
We go through our days looking in on our lives, aware that we are living on borrowed time, but unable to take a time-out and make changes.
In seminars and speeches, time and time again, people consistently come up to us with one issue. They say things like:
“I feel trapped. I’m bored beyond tears with what I do. I don’t know how I can continue in my current job, but I can’t (or won’t for financial reasons) leave.”
“I’ve reached a plateau in my career. I need to move on and test undeveloped talents.”
“I need to realize some of my lifelong dreams — like climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro!”
And they go on to ask:
“I wish my job gave me more flexibility. How can I take a timeout?”
We encourage these questioners to be “Walter Mitty” — James Thurber’s famous “time-outer” — for awhile. The message of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” is not so much the humor of Mitty’s mental time-outs, but that after each of his adventures, he settles back into his old life — only with a renewed sense of energy and perspective.
Many years of listening to people’s midlife stories has convinced us how deeply people hunger for little time-outs. And how much good it does to take them.
Satisfaction always leads to dissatisfaction; that’s human nature. It’s very difficult to sustain a passion for something you’ve been involved in for many years — whether that’s a job, a relationship, or a community. Success always becomes routine and mechanical; that’s how it becomes success in the first place. So you have to reinvent yourself. You have to dream of something new to revitalize the old, original feelings of aliveness.
When the surprise goes out of life, the life goes out of life, too. You no longer experience the growth edge that got up in the morning with a smile. Time-outs, though, are wake-up calls on purpose. They give us that new sense of surprise and mystery about what today will bring.
Richard says it was Richard Bolles (author of the perennial bestseller What Color Is Your Parachute?) who first challenged him to question his assumptions about taking time out. In a dinner conversation, Dick Bolles confronted the craziness of compressing work into the middle years of our lives. He asked Richard, “Why don’t you carve out chunks of your retirement along the way, instead of saving it all until the last years of your life?”
Richard decided to take Bolles’ advice seriously. Since 1984, he has set a goal of traveling to places like Africa every year. He has led yearly treks there for three decades and has helped to create the Dorobo Fund for Tanzania to support conservation and leadership development projects.
Richard says, “If it hadn’t been for Africa, I’m not sure I could have stayed all these years in this business. The time I take there each year gives me a context, a means to connect the separate parts of me into a whole. When I return, I never stop thinking of the images, not for a day. Even when it is not in my conscious mind, I can feel it somewhere. It is always there.”
Bolles later went on to propose new ways of restructuring our lifestyles and workstyles in his book, The Three Boxes of Life and How to Get Out of Them. He noted that traditionally, life has been viewed as made up of three boxes — Education, Work, and Retirement.17
Because people tend to live longer these days and, in general, are more affluent than their forebears, a new lifestyle model is needed. Instead of seeing the “retirement” box as 20-some years of old age tagged onto the end of a 30-some-years long “work” box, we can scrap the three boxes and create a new model that is more flexible and fluid, and more in keeping with current realities.
Still, most people find it difficult to muster up the courage to say good-bye and let go of the traditional model. The path from childhood to old age is still a straight line for most of us. The forces of inertia and money keep us moving in one direction, with little room for pausing, regrouping, detouring, or taking time-outs.
It’s no surprise, therefore, that many people feel isolated and alone, even while possessed of technology and systems meant to bring us all closer together.
The Age of Social Isolation
The Information Age has given us virtually unlimited access to facts, figures and data about nearly everything in the world; it has allowed for instantaneous networking among people and organizations all around the globe; it has streamlined communications in ways that would have seemed the stuff of science fiction barely a decade ago.
But has it led to closer, more authentic, more human connections among us? The answer is unclear. In fact, a strong case can be made that the Information Age has resulted in a world that is more fractured and individualistic than ever before. The Information Age, it can be said, has given way to what might be called The Age of Social Isolation.
These days, more and more of us are spending more and more of our time, both at home and at work, surfing the internet, texting and talking on mobile phones, attending to email, watching television, and being stimulated by other new media — all experiences that are relatively recent in their availability to human beings. And given that the widespread availability of such experiences correlates closely with an increased sense of stress and isolation for so many of us, one can’t help but conclude that they represent another major challenge to living the good life.
Why is this? As we become more connected, we seem to simultaneously become more disconnected, more isolated. An increasing number of the connections we do make are virtual, via phone or computer, as opposed to the tangible, face-to-face interactions we are made for. And, at the same time, as our high-tech experiences increase, we reduce the number of high-touch opportunities, choosing instead to spend our time watching videos or playing games online, or indulging in the many forms of escape from human contact available through allegedly “social” media.
This type of social isolation undermines our emotional well-being. Though they’re difficult to resist, resist we must in order to feel whole and truly connected with ourselves and others.
Richard has long been pushing back against the socially-isolating aspects of technology. He was an early resister of both email and mobile technology. As a life coach he often heard clients complain about having to be “on” 24/7 and how technology had hijacked the human moments in their lives.
Finding his own peace with technology has been an ongoing challenge for Richard, especially as it has increasingly become the preferred way of doing business and keeping in touch with friends and associates. He has effected a truce, if you will, by ensuring that the technology works for him, rather than the other way around. “I do email almost exclusively at my desk at work or at home,” he says, “and almost never on my mobile phone or on the fly. I only check my messages at certain times during the day — usually at 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m.; that’s it. I almost never leave my phone on during meetings or while in restaurants or public places. It pains me to have to hear other people’s mobile phone conversations in airplanes before takeoff, at coffee shops, or even — most pathetically — in restrooms. I honestly believe their lives would be better if only they’d restrict their use as I do. These days, I rarely let ringing phones capture my attention or even draw me away from what I’m doing — and I’m happier as a result.”
Although everyone’s lives are different and we all have different needs when it comes to our use of technology, there’s much to be said for — and gained by — setting limits like Richard does. Dave routinely assigns students in his Environmental Ethics class the challenge of going a weekend without using a computer, mobile phone, videogame console, MP3 player, or other high-tech devices. While it’s not uncommon for students to echo the words of one young man who said that he felt as if he was “in prison,” many also tell him how liberating they found the experience. One young woman wrote, in her reflective paper, that for the first time in a long time she could actually “hear herself think.”
Another effective antidote to 24/7 living is to cultivate silence. Many of us are unaware of how loud our lives are, and how the constant noise we experience affects our sense of calm and well-being. In his revealing book, In Pursuit of Silence; Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise, author George Prochnik tells of being on patrol in Washington, DC with a police officer named John Spencer, who explained to him that the majority of the domestic disputes he responds to these days are actually noise complaints. Spencer said:
“You go into these houses where the couple, or the roommate, or the whole family is fighting, and you’ve got the television blaring so you can’t think, and a radio on top of that, and somebody who got home from work who wants to relax or sleep, and it’s obvious what they’re actually fighting about. They’re fighting about the noise. They don’t know it, but that’s the problem.”
Before he even lets the combatants explain why they’re fighting, Spencer routinely has them turn down the music and television, and switch off the game station, and just sit there for a minute. “You’d be amazed,” he says, “how often that’s the end of it.”
Think about the disputes in your own life, not just with others, but also within yourself. How many of these are the product of just too much noise? How many could be resolved by just cultivating a few moments of silence?
Reboot Your Life
Finding meaning through the busy routines of work and life is not easy.
Many of us are afflicted with what can be called “hurry sickness”: the feeling that there’s too much to do, that we can’t possibly slow down, that we’ll never catch up and get done what needs to be done. Hurry sickness — always going somewhere, never being anywhere — is numbing our conscious awareness of what is happening in and to our lives.
Our very sense of humanity — our full presence in our own lives — is being hijacked by busyness.
Our daily routines often lack a sense of purpose, and appear to serve no apparent end. To find that sense of meaning and purpose we need to reboot our operating systems and see beneath the surface, to a place where we can experience authentic knowing — not with the mind, but with the heart.
David Levy, a professor in the Information School at the University of Washington, created a video called “No Time to Think,” that brings this point home in stark relief. The video offers a disturbing wake-up call, showing how American society has become enslaved to an ethic of “more-better-faster,” and is losing the capacity for reflection and presence. Levy’s research focuses on why the technological devices — computers, smartphones, and so on — that are designed to connect us also seem to disconnect us.
A technology like Twitter may be the next level of connection, but surely there is something strange and ironic about the acceleration of Twittering as our human moments of presence dwindle. Instead of connecting us, our devices are isolating us.
And this isolation is becoming the norm.
Email, voicemail, instant messaging, mobile phone, text messaging, Facebook, Twitter, and of course the World Wide Web all serve useful roles.
But these tools for connecting also crowd out our moments of deeper purpose and relationship.
According to Thomas Eriksen of the University of Oslo, author of Tyranny of the Moment, the digital environment favors “fast-time” activities — those that require instant, urgent responses. The right-now is trumping the timeless — high-tech is hijacking high-touch. Such activities tend to take precedence over and shut out “slow-time” activities, such as reflection, play, and “courageous conversations.”
And, as a result, we are becoming numb and fatigued. Deep-down, behind-the-eyeballs fatigued.
A remedy for this is to reboot — to reset our internal operating systems.
One effective way to reboot is to take a 12-hour “media fast” — a time during which you turn off all technology.
When we take a media fast, we unmask illusions. We confront what parts of our busyness are expressions of our real purpose.
When we lose touch with our core, we lose perspective on our purpose. We gain back our perspective by turning off technology and by letting our intuitive voice guide us.
Sometimes we are open to rebooting; at other times we are not. When crises drop into our lives, we are forced to reboot. At times when things seem to be going smoothly, we may not sense the need at all.
But the truth is: “pay now or pay later.” Failing to stop and take stock of our lives now inevitably results in things getting away from us later. Taking a media fast may seem strange, yet it can help us pay now. It can enable us to connect more meaningfully not only with others, but also with ourselves.
When we’re connected to everyone, we don’t really know anyone. In order to know people, we have to listen to their stories.
But we live in an age when we rarely take time to hear each other’s stories.
So, we live on assumptions.
We’re busy people, after all, and we want our friendships easy and stress-free.
To counteract this, take a media fast — go without media or gadgets for 12 hours!
No mobile phone, computer, TV or radio for 12 hours. A break from techno-busyness forces us to confront core questions about life.
Questions like:
• “Do I see friends enough?”
• “Do I really know their stories?”
• “Am I accessible to them?”
On the morning of your media fast, try to get up a little earlier than usual.
Before you get involved in anything, just sit quietly for ten minutes and take three deep breaths.
First breath: be present.
Second breath: be grateful.
Third breath: decide to make a positive difference in one person’s life, today.
Then envision your next twelve hours.
Picture the activities of the day without technology.
Picture the potential “purpose moments” — times you might make someone else’s life just a little bit — or even a lot — better.
Throughout the day, look for those purpose moments — opportunities to connect with people through a question, a kind word, an extended hand.
In the purpose moments, ask people what they are truly excited about, passionate about, a learning adventure that was exciting for them — and listen.
What is the mood of these purpose moments?
Typically, it’s one most of us yearn for — the feeling that there’s someone in our lives who cares.
Whether we’re aware of it or not, most of us want someone to push the pause button on technology and listen to our stories. We’re hungry for deep connection.
The essence of rebooting is captured clearly by William Deresiewicz in an essay entitled Faux Friendship. He writes, “Exchanging stories is like making love. It is mutual. It is intimate. It takes patience, devotion, sensitivity, subtlety, skill — and it teaches those qualities too.”
Rebooting our operating systems is powerful.
It slows us down to the speed of the story.
It teaches us that patience, devotion, sensitivity, subtlety, skill, and sharing are fundamental qualities to finding meaning in a stressed-out world.
In other words, it helps us find ourselves, right where we belong.
A Vacation From Words
Having successfully completed a “media fast,” you may want to take it to the next step — a full-on “vacation from words.”
The average adult American speaks approximately 5000 words a day. And the more successful we become, the more talking we tend to do. Words come spilling out of us, often with great intensity. We have so much to say, there’s never time to listen — not to anyone else, and certainly not to ourselves.
That’s a why a 24-hour “mini-vacation” from words at your favorite listening point can be so significant. A vacation from words provides a unique way to experience self-renewal. It’s an opportunity to unpack everything for a brief period, even in the face of overwhelming busyness. It’s a chance to find a new reason for getting up in the morning — or rediscover an old one.
A 24-hour retreat to your listening point allows the truth to creep back into your life. It enables you to ask yourself, “What is this situation I’m in (or person I’m involved with) trying to teach me?” And above all, it provides you the space you need to really hear the answer.
Following are ten points you may choose to reflect on in your listening point. Some of these are ideas touched on in other parts of this book. Others are issues we’ve found useful to think about during our own periods of reflection. In either case, we encourage you to find time at your listening point to take a vacation from words and consider one or more of the items listed here. You don’t have to talk about these with anyone — just listen.
Repacking Reflections
1. Rediscover your hidden talents.
Life at its source is about creating. Talents are the creative core of your life. What are you creating? Are you expressing your talents fully? If not, how can you?
2. Reclaim your purpose.
Talents develop best in the crucible of purpose. When you’re using your talents in support of something you truly believe in, you feel more energetic, more committed, and more enthusiastic about everything you do. Have you reclaimed your purpose? If not, what can you do to own it?
3. Reinvent your job.
Satisfaction always leads to dissatisfaction. Most things repeated over and over become mechanical. Even the things we love best become stale if we don’t renew them regularly. Are you regularly reinventing your job? Are you continually looking for new problems to solve, new ways to add value? How can you reinvent your job so you get up every morning (or at least most mornings) excited about the prospects ahead?
4. Re-elect your personal board of directors.
Most of us can trace our successes to pivotal support from other people. What are the important relationships that have sustained you along the way? Who are the people in your life that you’ve relied on for counsel and advice? Think of them as your own personal board of directors. Picture yourself at a board meeting with these people. You’re all around the table. Who sits at the head? Do you? As you sit there, right now, what issues would you like to bring before the board? How would you like them to react and what kind of support are you looking for?
5. Re-sharpen your growth edge.
If the rate at which you’re learning is not equal to or greater than the rate of change today, you’ll soon be obsolete. Just like a successful company, you need to engage in serious Research & Development activity. Research new opportunities. And develop new skills. Learning brings aliveness. What are you excited about learning? How can you continually sharpen your growth edge?
6. Repack your relationship bags.
Many of us, even in our deepest, most personal relationships, figuratively have a bag by the door, partially packed. Consider the primary relationships in your life. Are you and your loved ones having “radical conversations”? Does it feel like you’re creating a “grand dialogue”? The number one cause of relationship problems is suppressed communication. How can you fully unpack with your loved ones and open the door for deeper, more meaningful communication?
7. Reframe your time boundaries.
Sit down with your calendar and your checkbook. Review how you’re spending two of your most valuable currencies — your time and your money. Are you satisfied with where your time and money are going? When was the last time you went to sleep at night saying, “this was a well-spent day”? Are you consistently saying “no” to the less important things in your life and “yes” to your real priorities?
8. Rewrite your own vision of the good life.
The self-fulfilling prophecy is the surest of all — if you can dream it, you can do it. Beware of waking up sometime in the future and finding out that you’ve been living someone else’s vision of the good life. Look forward. Dream a little. How do you “declare victory”? What does success really look like to you?
Are you “always going somewhere; never being anywhere”? Have you succumbed to the “hurry sickness” so common in today’s society? If your brain is always filled with the noise and chatter of modern living then you’re exhibiting the symptoms. If your heart and mind feel numb, then you know you’ve got it. The antidote: regular time-outs. Mini-vacations. Appointments with yourself. Even fifteen minutes or so a day can work wonders. Have you found a regular time and place to be alone, to put yourself on your own daily calendar?
10. Rediscover your smile.
The average person smiles fifteen times a day. Does that seem like a lot or a little to you? Are you having fun yet? Are you experiencing real joy? Fun and joy are different. Fun is an outer expression, joy is an inner glow. Joy is derived from a harmony among place, love, work, and purpose. Are you feeling more or less joy in your life than you did last year at this time? Why or why not?
Everything Old Is New
Life is nothing else than a dynamic process. It’s impossible to somehow find and catch happiness, because as soon as you trap it, it begins to wither. That’s actually what repacking is all about — it’s a system for helping you with the continuing search. No matter what form that system takes, it has to come from within.
In the 17th century the philosopher Benedict de Spinoza engaged in his own repacking. He began by considering the efforts involved in pursuing what most people esteemed as the highest good — riches, fame, and the pleasure of senses. Spinoza concluded that, while these had their attractions, they could never provide him with the authentic happiness for which he was searching. He made a great discovery, which he phrased as follows. “Happiness or unhappiness is made wholly to depend on the quality of the object which we love.” If we love fleeting attractions and transitory values, our happiness will be fleeting and transitory as well. On the other hand, if we seek to fix our love to longer-lasting values, our happiness likewise tends to persevere.
Spinoza laid down three principles for how to carry on his life in a manner that would permit him to engage in his ongoing search for what really mattered to him. In summary, these were to:
• Comply with every general custom that does not hinder the attainment of our purpose.
• Indulge ourselves with pleasures only in so far as they are necessary for preserving health.
• Endeavor to obtain sufficient money or other commodities to enable us to preserve our life and health, and to follow such general customs as are consistent with our purpose.
Three hundred or so years later, we’re offering pretty much the same advice:
• Figure out what matters and what doesn’t.
• Invest your time and energy in the things that do.
• Pack your bags with the things that “enable you to live purposefully” and set aside those that don’t.
Which just goes to prove that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Life: The Final Frontier
Star Trek has it all wrong — it’s not outer space that’s the final frontier. It’s inner space.
Albert Schweitzer wrote, “Every start upon an untrodden path is a venture which only in unusual circumstances looks sensible and likely to succeed.”
Frontiers are the places we can get lost, the places we haven’t yet boxed in with fences or straight roads. They are the places that once were a continent wide. Or even wider — as wide as our imaginations.
Frontiers symbolize not just new places, but also the full experience of those places. One of the real pleasures of traveling untrodden paths is the sense of freedom and independence such travel provides. Ever notice how more outgoing you are when you’re in a new town that you know you’ll never live in? Since nobody knows you, you can be whoever you want — or whoever you really are.
As humans, we’re natural explorers. We require new challenges to sustain us. The benefits of frontiers, therefore, are not only symbolic, but practical, too. They sustain our beings and our bodies; they nourish us in our search for wholeness, and for holiness.
Like Denys Finch-Hatten, our friend Richard “Rocky” Kimball feels that a safari is not just a safari, but a spiritual and moral quest — a holy necessity. As Rocky puts it, “When our lives are at stake, we form bonds that we have at no other time. On a wilderness trek, everything is simpler, cleaner, more profound.”
Rocky explains why he and Richard jumped at the chance to explore new frontiers on a safari into the center of Tanzania. “Neither of us could stay off the open roads for long. I guess we both like dust! Out there, learning is more real than in the hotel conference rooms where we often teach seminars together.”
As poet and philosopher Wendell Berry says, “Solutions have perhaps the most furtive habits of any creatures; they reveal themselves very hesitantly in artificial light, and never enter air-conditioned rooms.”
Experiencing Experience
The more people we talk to, the clearer it becomes to us that we’re a nation of transients. Americans average eleven moves in a lifetime. Every year, an estimated 43 million of us — one-fifth of the population — move somewhere new. Given how often we relocate, you might get the impression it’s something we look forward to with anticipation and joy.
Actually, for most of us, it’s just the opposite.
Geographic moves are life’s third-most-stressful event — right after the death of a loved one and divorce. A big part of that stress is because we tend to spend the entire experience out in front of ourselves. We rush along, out of breath, scrambling to reach a new destination where maybe, just maybe, there will be some kind of payoff — maybe the good life we’ve been chasing.
And yet ironically, most of us would prefer to appreciate the trip. We’d like to experience the journey with our senses wide open. But for some reason, it usually doesn’t work that way. Most people don’t enjoy the process — whether it’s a move across the country or a move across town. All the effort put into it isn’t worth the payoff. It’s too little return for far too much invested.
People who have mastered the art of traveling, though, realize that it isn’t about putting something in to get something out. It’s about an ongoing process in which the effort and the payoff are one. If we live only for the destination, for some hoped-for success in a far-off future, we’re going to totally miss the trip.
Richard admits he knows all about that.
“I Think I Missed the Trip!”
A number of years ago, I was giving a speech to an insurance industry group in Maui. I noticed a lot of T-shirts in the audience that read, “I Survived the Road to Hana.” I asked some people about it and they related tales of how incredibly beautiful it was, with its Seven Sacred Pools, its opportunities for whale-watching, and — of interest to me as a Minnesotan — the grave of Charles Lindbergh there on the tip of Maui.
I had a few hours after my speech before my flight, so after checking a map to assure myself I had time to make it, I pointed my rental car toward Hana and began driving. Thirteen switchbacks into the fifty-four that make up the “road to hell,” I pulled over, opened the car door, and threw-up.
I hadn’t just not survived the road to Hana, I hadn’t even come close! Turning around and heading for the airport though, I resolved I’d be back.
I told the story of Hana to my then 15-year-old daughter, Greta, and she was equally excited by the prospect of visiting there one day. About a year and a half later the opportunity presented itself. This time it was a vacation in Hawaii with Greta. We added two extra days to the trip so we could include Maui and Hana. All the while over on the plane, we talked about how great it was going to be — the Seven Sacred Pools, the whales, the adventure of surviving the road to Hana.
Finally, the day arrived. We went all-out and rented a convertible. With great anticipation we set off. I told Greta we were in for the adventure of our lives — and it wouldn’t even take that long. We’d be home in time to spend the afternoon at the beach so she could work on her tan.
At the sixth switchback on the road to Hana, it started raining. We put the convertible top up and discovered the rental car had no air-conditioning. This made speed imperative — both to get some airflow going and to get out of the hot, sticky car as quickly as possible.
At the twenty-fifth switchback, Greta implored me to stop. “I’m sick,” she cried. “Why are we doing this? I could be at the beach!”
I assured her that she was going to love Hana, that it wasn’t much farther, and promised to drive as quickly as possible the last leg of the way. I punched the accelerator as far to the floor as I could.
Finally, we entered Hana — tired, hungry, and cranky. But all we could find to refresh ourselves was an old clapboard Chinese store. We pulled into the parking lot alongside other Hana “survivors,” and discovered to boot, that there were no restrooms in the vicinity. Greta and I looked at each other in silence. Meanwhile, we overheard the animated conversations of other travelers: “Did you see those whales breaching?” “Yes, but how about those botanical gardens? They were out of this world!” “Definitely, but I’ve never seen such beautiful trails and vistas!”
A long moment. Finally, Greta turned to me and broke the tension. “Dad,” she said, “I think we missed the trip.”
After a brief tour around Hana, which looked pretty much like every other small, beautiful Hawaiian town, we returned slowly, with our convertible top down, back to the beach. The drive was wonderful. We realized that on the road to Hana, it’s not Hana that you’re going for, it’s “the road.” It’s not the final destination, it’s the trip itself.
Greta’s statement, “I think we missed the trip,” has proved to be a powerful metaphor to describe the way many people live their lives. We use it all the time in speeches, conversations, and seminars — and people seem to know what we’re talking about right away. We encourage them — as we encourage you now — to take the rest of the journey more like Richard and Greta did on their return — with the top down. Don’t just survive the trip, live it! Enjoy the experience along the way.