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As we make our way in our work, we are driven by universal impulses to gain proficiency, experience pleasure, secure power, and find purpose. Yet each of these drives, with their subtle nuance, easily become distraction from our truer selves, a deeper plight, and a larger story. We are people, after all.
Adolescent angst is a precursor to a lifelong battle for identity. When a baby brings sleepless nights, dreams may be compromised. Seeds of mid-life crises are sown early into soil of doubt and panic. Unexpected obstacles and diversions in our careers may leave us despairing. Death often comes without warning and buries with it the unreconciled or unfinished, leaving a wake of grief, paralyzed.
There is no end in this life to struggle and heartache and no bottom to their void. At times, we all find ourselves in despair. At best, we respond to struggles in ways that mine them for gems and enhance relationships. At worst, we respond in ways that maintain fear, shame, or anger in our lives or in others’.
“Life is difficult.”
This is the famous opening line of Scott Peck’s wonderful book, The Road Less Traveled. Peck described four disciplines necessary for solving life’s problems—
#1 – Delaying Gratification
Zig Ziglar once said, “The chief cause of unhappiness is trading what you want most for what you want now.” To the extent that we pursue autonomy and achievement, acquisition and authority, apart from integrity, or wholeness, we will find that as we gain them, they will no less fail to fill the vacuum.
As we curate our professional identity and play capture the flag, we risk losing touch with an instinct for spontaneity, creativity, and love—fruits of cultivation, not curation, integrity, not drivenness. Without them, we avoid relationships and ourselves and contrive false solutions to life’s problems.
#2 – Taking Up Courage
Most of us live in the oscillation between varying degrees of domestic isolation and identity confusion. Becoming vocationally mature requires becoming spiritually mature, and it requires great care to plant, light, water, and wait.
Bono said, “It’s stasis that kills you off in the end, not ambition.” We are worth so much more, and we can do and have and be so much more than to strive for riches, store them up, or bathe in them.
We have to release a death grip on control and stop waiting for a star to point the way. We know we have a greater power, and life is its opportunity. It lies within and is activated by courage. Yet we go to great lengths to justify fear and inaction.
#3 – Dedication to Truth
As cultural beings, we live by bias and perception. We must strip away assumptions and anxieties that remain attached to an internalized schema of the world and our own identity—who we are, what we’re good for, and what we expect of life—our mentalities hijacked by herd and mob, and neither herd nor mob requiring or offering integrity or justice. We must become honest, and this is not a painless process.
Socrates wrote, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Pity and pride are sins of equal proportion. There must be an acknowledgment of defenses and masks, a removal of armor that protects us from imagined threats that we have transferred from an outdated map. The enemy has disguised himself and remains protected by the very reflexes, compulsions, and destructive behaviors that we live by.
#4 – Balancing
Impulses woven into the fabric of character and memory are not easily eliminated. Like unregulated blood sugar or cholesterol, diet alone will merely control such a condition. Successful treatment requires drastic remodeling of the environments, nourishment, and lifestyle that ushered it into being.
For fruit trees to grow large and healthy fruit, they must be pruned. We must let go of parts of ourselves—habits, hobbies, and attitudes not aligned with integrity, justice, or beauty. Despair grows as we feed it, and so does hope and expectancy. We must engage in self-pruning to become fully mature.
The Fruits of Integrity
Rachel Dawes, Bruce Wayne’s childhood friend in Batman Begins said, “It’s not who you are underneath, it’s what you do that defines you.” The world needs us far more than it needs our products and services. Ambition and experience are vice and meaning an illusion apart from integrity. Soren Kierkegaard once wrote that “the opposite of despair is to be that self which one truly is.”
When Jesus taught, “Deny yourself,” it was not a renunciation of self-worth but selfish-ways. When he urged, “Take up your cross and follow me,” it wasn’t an invitation toward religion or away from our strengths. When he said not to worry about what to eat or where to sleep, it wasn’t to undermine our instincts for survival but to shift focus to gardening our lives in a way that produces vitality in the world.
Paul of Tarsus, an enemy turned apostle of Jesus, wrote to encourage other Christians to cultivate love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control, none of which are centered in accomplishment or, on the face of it, personal gain. Even joy is intended as “gratitude in spite of suffering,” rather than happiness, if you know anything of the apostle Paul.
Robert Frost wrote, “Life is tons of discipline.” Scott Peck described a disciplined life as one engaged in “legitimate suffering,” implying that we do not engage in such discipline to minimize discomfort or to master our destiny but to live wisely, rather than to live foolishly. Life cannot be hacked. It must be faced. Despair is not inevitable. Responsibility is inevitable.
Previously published on LinkedIn
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Photo Credit: Getty Images