Help Wanted: People who are alive
The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.
I have a feeling I might be a little late to the party.
The above quote by Frederick Buechner represents my most recent growing edge in my spiritual and psychological development. By most recent I mean the last six years or so.
I say that I might be a little late to the party because I have a feeling that many of the people around me learned this lesson much earlier in their lives. That is, being true to themselves and then trusting the Universe to let them know their place.
That has not been my psychological wiring for most of my adult life.
I have spent most of my life as a striver, an achiever, a producer of products. I grew up with the assumption and the message that one has to “carve out” one’s place in life. “If you don’t make a life, no one else is going to do it for you,” is the message I assumed about life. It was pretty close to the:
You can be anything you want to be in America as long as you set your mind on it and work hard for it.
And that worked for me for a long time. It worked for me for at least twenty years of my adulthood. It worked for me until it didn’t.
About six years ago I started practicing something different. Instead of striving and reaching and grasping for something that I thought I wanted, now I am slowly learning to just put myself out in the world and trust that the world will let me know what it needs from me.
The Buechner quote is my “go to” reminder when I get anxious and start backtracking to old habits. Old habits like regressing to a life of “trying to make things happen” rather than “letting things happen.” Even writing those words makes me feel a little lightheaded and anxious!
Trust is scary for me, but this is the life I am practicing and experimenting with.
This life of trusting is somewhat new to me and my anxiety flares up quite frequently. I know all of you have been witness to that. It is true that I am an anxious person, but when people hear the level of uncertainty in my life, I often hear, “I could never do that. It would make me too anxious!” I find some comfort in that.
The truth is I have made a decision to live out of this “non-striving, non-reaching, non-grasping” orientation despite the uncertainty and the accompanying anxiety that comes with it.
In my happy place—crossing the Nevada Desert, 2011
The current exercise in trust is having no plan for where my life will be beginning May 1. I don’t know what I will be doing, where I will be living, or what my financial situation will be. It’s not that I am just sitting in the easy chair waiting. No, I have put myself out there. I have let the world know what my “deep gladness” is and am waiting for the world to tell me what its deep hunger is. I am trusting that the world will give me some hints pretty soon, but for a “make it happen” type person, this waiting and let it happen is excruciating at times.
Why do I share this? Because I am convinced that the world is only going to become more chaotic, less certain and threaten whatever security most of us are still holding onto. I share this because, despite the anxiety involved, I believe the future is going to increasingly be built around the “deep gladness” each of us bring to life rather than us trying to twist ourselves into a mold the world created.
Dr. Howard Thurman, an American author, philosopher, theologian, mystic educator, and civil rights leader was famous for saying,
Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
I like that. I just pray that it also pays the bills.