Leaving a Wallet, Finding Enlightenment.
I used to take my wallet with me everywhere I went. Obviously when I was driving, but also on walks. The first thing I would do before leaving the house would be to check for my wallet. The few times I forgot to pocket it left me feeling incomplete, perhaps even a little naked, the moment during my walk when I would discover its absence.
A few years ago though, I started leaving my wallet behind when I went on my longer walks. I wanted to be rid of the encumbrance. And I don’t mean the physical weight of the thing.
We often get caught up in the idea that who we are is defined by a number on a computer, or what we own, what we do, or in this case, the papers and documents that bear our name and follow us throughout our lives. Now for legal reasons, some of those things are of course important for any number of reasons. Yet beyond that, these are not the things that show the world what type of person we are. Nothing in our wallet shows how we treat people. What we fear. To what we aspire. They don’t show our scars nor our dreams. They do not extinguish our bad memories any more than they sweeten our joyful ones. They are merely ornament, but we treat them as extensions of our true selves. In many ways the wallet (or purse) is the headquarters of this view of ourselves.
It didn’t strike me as interesting until recently that the contents of our wallets and purses are often referred to as our “identification.” We are sort of brought up to believe this. Ergo when we lose such things, we suffer more than the obvious pain in the ass of cancelling credit cards and replacing driver’s licenses. We actually feel the horrific pangs of personal loss.
“My whole life was in that thing,” we lament.
And that says it all, doesn’t it? Yes you’ll have your work cut out for you for a few weeks, but are the contents of your wallet truly your “whole life”? As a soul are you less complete without them? I’d say no, of course. But if you earnestly feel you would be, perhaps a reexamination of priorities is in order.
A little effort every day towards knowing who we our at our core, ignoring what society says we must seek and possess in order to be whole brings us one step closer to getting to know our pure, unencumbered selves.
Leaving my wallet behind sometimes is just one small way of implementing this idea in my daily life.
Of course leaving my wallet on the table when I walk for a few hours is not in and of itself going to grant me all the wisdom of the ages here. But it is a convenient symbolism for me which serves to remind me that there is the “Ty on paper”, and then there is the far more real, more deep, (and more accurate) “Ty the person.” The twain rarely meet. Thank heaven.
Do you ever take the time to remind yourself that you are more than your career/stuff/money/position? How do you go about doing so? If you haven’t yet, what sort of symbolic gestures might you take to engage in such a step? Let me know.
It’s All About Your OWN Blood, Sweat, and Tears…Not THEIRS
Recently, Brazen Careerist featured a blog post by one Jun Loayza. In brief, he talks about embracing one’s DNA. In other words, not forcing yourself to be something you are not. To make the best uses of whatever your personal traits are in order to succeed in all aspects of life. Because this view is very much in line with the premise of Too XYZ, I suggest you give this post a read. Here it is.
On top of Mr. Loayza’s point, I would add that we need to measure our level of “hard work”, and that of others, according to similar metrics.
In other words nobody likes a lazy person. We all are rightly expected to in general put some effort into our lives. But sometimes in this society we tend to measure that effort in terms of direct productivity as defined by the ingrained, (and in my view, destructive) Protestant Work Ethic. Too often we ignore the intangible work, the unseen internal efforts that are a part of the daily lives of many people, as well as ourselves.
Explore an example with me.
Let’s say someone has started a new blog. A working mother of three school-aged kids. Obviously they take up a lot of her time in the evening, and work takes up all of her day. But she is committed to having a regularly updated blog, with a post every other day. So on those days she gets up two hours early, say around 4AM. The family is still asleep. She hates being awake too, but it’s her only time to be alone with her thoughts.
So she struggles to be awake that early. She checks her notes. Thinks very hard about that morning’s post, with an obvious struggle to complete every single sentence. After meticulously proofreading it twice, she clicks “Submit” just as the call of her youngest asking for breakfast reaches her ears at 6:00AM.
Our mom figure is obviously a bit more tired at the end of that day than other days.
She’s not on Twitter. She hasn’t joined Brazen Careerist. Knows little about advertising or marketing or networking. Barely has enough energy to write the post. A post which in and of itself was what some may call of average quality, but with a certain witty, down to earth charm. Analytics, (if she ever used them or even knew what they were) would tell her that 2 people in the world read the post with which she struggled so much this morning, and one of them was probably her sister down town.
A check of her subscribers shows that same sister, one random guy without a photo, and her best friend, who never checks the blog anyway. This mother therefore has zero so called “social proof”, and even if some professional guru by chance stumbled across her blog, they would say, “well if only three people subscribed she must be a lazy, thoughtless writer. Who cares about wasting my time on this trash?”
And they would click off, not even bothering to see if she had anything of interest to say. Certainly leaving no comments. As few people ever do on our mom’s blog.
But because she either doesn’t want to know all of this, or can’t know all of this because social media is beyond her, our mom two days later is up once again at 4:00 AM to do it all over again. And she does so because she is committed to becoming a blogger and improving her writing.
According to the majority of metrics out there to measure success, this woman is a total failure as a blogger. Where are the tie ins? What SEO person has she hired? Why are there not Twitter feeds mentioning her latest post? Who is she linking to? More importantly who ever linked to her? How many comments does she have? How many subscribers? She needs a serious graphic designer at 100 bucks an hour to clean up this mess of a website. She doesn’t even own her own domain name. Lazy and uninspired woman.
Whereas I see someone who is pushing their personality, their very nature to the limits, in order to do something she believes in. She isn’t trying to be something she is not. She is simply going the extra mile with what she has in order to improve something about herself. She has put forth a great deal of energy, her own personal type of energy, to do what she does. This is hard for her to do. But she does it anyway, and in this she is a hard working writer and blogger. A blogger as much as anybody else is. More so even then some more “successful” ones.
I try to measure my own work ethic by these standards. I go and do things that are just barely part of my make up. Things that are a struggle for me, even if they are easy for others. I don’t do all of what many contemporaries say I should do as a writer, a blogger, an actor, because that would be trying to become something I am not. But some of the things I can do, I often sweat over. Become drained by.
Sometimes I am even afraid of them. But I do them. And while that results-based Protestant Work Ethic would look at the overall tangible results of my last year and say, “lazy failure”, I know that I am actually putting forth a great deal of effort that is unique to me in order to go where I want to go. It’s not easy to ignore the societal definition of hard work, but I must try to do so. We all must try to do so. Do you?
My Piece on IGrad.com
I was recently approached to write an article for Igrad.com. It got posted last night. You can find it here.
Igrad.com’s slogan is “Your future…Our Focus.” As its title suggests it offer blogs, articles, (like mine) links and other such resources for the college student and recent graduate, but is valuable to anyone hoping to sharpen their professional image and knowledge.
My piece is about how living on a college campus is just one of the many ways that college actually postpones adulthood, as opposed to the commonly held belief that it is a stepping stone to same.
Check out the piece and the website. Let me know what you think of it, either here or over at Igrad. And while you are add it, go ahead and sign up as a member. It’s free.
Kids Are Heroes
I recently wrote another piece for FiNDiTFREDERiCK Magazine about the Kids Are Heroes organization. I hope that you will follow the links and read it, not only because I want to share my work as a writer, but because I’d like to help spread the word about this fine organization.
You can follow the link to their own website to learn more, but here are the basics.
Gabe O’Neill’s Daughter, MaryMargaret (age 8 at the time) wanted to raise money to help some local children in need. She wanted to organize a fund raising campaign to do this, and with a small amount of help from her father, was able to spread the word and exceed her fund raising goal for her project. Fast forward a few years, and MaryMargaret and her father are now at the head of Kids Are Heroes, an organization dedicated to helping children from around the country, and even the world, develop and realize their own ideas for how to make the world a better place.
By becoming a “hero” within the organization, a child has access to all kinds of advice, networks, and resources which can help them achieve their particular charitable goals.
I did not meet MaryMargaret when I wrote the piece, but I spoke to Mr. O’Neill, and I can assure you his enthusiasm alone was enough to understand the mission of Kids Are Heroes.
Perhaps you know a child who has a vision to help his or her community? Perhaps they should know about Kids Are Heroes? Just read my article to learn more, and follow the link to their own homepage to get even more details.
Don’t Use the “Force”
I don’t like to be forced to do anything. Even by myself. So I don’t force myself into anything for which I am not yet ready.
There have been, and continue to be things that I find difficult or impossible that many people are able to do with ease. Things that many insist must be done, even if by force, in order to succeed. (Elevator pitches, cold calling, going to networking events in other cities, going to nightclubs, “getting out there”, making sexuality a top priority, establishing social proof, never requesting a separate check, to name more than a few things people have tried to force me to do, usually with unpleasant results.)
I firmly believe there is more than one way to do just about anything. The alternative may be the long way around via a far lonelier road, but we can all basically get there eventually. But we can’t ever realize that if we are too busy beating ourselves into submission. (Or allowing ourselves to be beaten thus by someone else.) So instead of forcing myself into some things, I take some time to evaluate why I need to be forced into it in the first place.
When I had a toy with movable parts as a kid, and one of the parts would get stuck somehow, one of the first things an adult would tell me is, “don’t force it, you’ll break it! Let me take a look.” That’s because there is a reason for any dysfunction, and discovering that reason will either present the solution to the problem, or reveal that the cause is hopeless, and that it is time to get a new toy. The same can be said about our own resistences.
“You’ve got to force yourself to change,” you’ll hear many gurus say. “You need so and so in order to get rich, or popular, or successful, or loved.” But the fact is you are Too XYZ to be forced into anything, and when you are, like those toys, things tend to break.
Take a step back. Why don’t you want to take this action? What happens when you have been forced to do so in the past? How do you feel when you try to do certain things? Have you always felt this way about an action, or was there a time when you wouldn’t have to be “forced” into it? Is there another way to achieve the same goal? If so, should you, or should you try to methodically end your resistance to something? Think long and hard about it. The time an energy spent on such introspection will be worth infinitely more to you than will be the energy spent on trying to force something that just isn’t ready to give.
When you look closer at what you have to be forced to do, one of two things happens. You come to understand the components of your resistance and thus can begin to address the smaller issues pertaining to it. When those are addressed, the resistance can sometimes be removed entirely. No force needed. Or, the other result is that you find that an aspect of yourself cannot be changed, and you simply cannot take the action in question. But you can resign to that fact in a deliberate, calm manner, as opposed to being shattered by the defensive fear that springs up when you try to force yourself to do things you do not want to do.
In either case, you have learned more about yourself. And whether that means a block has been removed, or you are able to find an alternate route, you will have benefited from the simple act of introspection. Far more than had you been forced.
Ty Unglebower 