Are You a Fugitive From Yourself?

“Human beings have always employed an enormous variety of clever devices for running away from themselves — we can keep ourselves so busy, fill our lives with so many diversions, stuff our heads with so much knowledge, involve ourselves with so many people, and cover so much ground that we never have time to probe the fearful and wonderful world within — by middle life, most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves.”  John Gardner

Accomplished fugitives from ourselves?

Ouch! I kinda wish I hadn’t run across that quote again.

I bumped into it on my third trip through a favorite book, “Life Launch: A Passionate Guide to the Rest of Your Life” by Pamela McLean and Frederic Hudson.  That quote is highlighted, underlined, asterisked and the page paper-clipped.  In my lexicon of weird reading habits, that means five-star important – stop, listen, reflect.

Reflection tends to reveal truth. Truth can hurt but truth is reality.

Reality is, I’m still a fugitive.

Feeling better about my fugitive status

Currently, I’m a fugitive with mostly misdemeanors – no new felonies.  A quarter-century ago, at that 50-year middle-life point, I was guilty of felonies, a handful of them, all inter-related.  I’m not going all-naked, but here are a few of the more serious felonies:

• Suppression of my essential self
• Succumbing to culturally-defined external roles (aka building someone else’s dream)
• Thinking only in an ideological/theological bubble, hearing mostly echoes
• Comparison

It wasn’t enough that I ran into the Gardner quote.  Then Martha Beck stepped up 18 months ago with her book version of a groin kick called “Finding Your North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live” to remind me that, although I may have expunged some of the felonies, some remain, along with far too many misdemeanors. Much work is still to be done to uncover and release my “essential self.”

I have a paragraph from Beck’s book that I’ve memorized and try to proclaim every day:

“Freed from rigid social expectations, focused firmly on guidance from your essential self, you will stop conforming to any of the pre-designated patterns offered by your cultural environment.  Instead, you will turn your life into a work of art: an absolutely original expression of your unique gifts and preferences.”

Hmmmm. “-unique gifts and preferences.”  “-the fearful and wonderful life within.” “- life into a work of art.”   Ever think about these things?

Maybe (hopefully) you aren’t an off-the-chart, introverted, reclusive, grand –poopah of information gathering like me and have broken out and found those unique gifts and that wonderful inner life.  But I’ll stick my neck out and say you probably haven’t.

It’s a tough journey, this self-discovery trip.

Those unique gifts and wonderful inner life get pretty plastered over by the mid-forties/ the early fifties.  By that point, we’re saying I couldn’t possibly:

• leave this job to write those books I know are inside me
• start my own business
• dig wells in Africa
• give up my healthcare insurance
• sacrifice my 401K match
• betray my hard-won image

So, we crank along suppressing our own dreams in favor of building someone else’s, succumbing to the grip of comparison, maintaining a “look good, smell good” image at all costs, seeking life-sapping comfort instead of life-affirming risk, all the while denying that time is slipping away ever more rapidly.

In the court of life potential, these are all felonies.

Then at mid-life, we create our own internal prisons.  And the prison guards/interrogators in there are cruel, incessant, with questions like:

• Really? This is all you’ve got to show for your life?
• Why do you think you are here?
• How do you feel about just taking up space and using up oxygen?
• What part of “you can’t take it with you” do you not understand?
• You’re concerned about what gossipy Joe and Emma next door might think if you break out? What’s up with that?
• When are you going to let the “real you” come alive?
• How much longer are you going to refuse to admit that you are uniquely gifted and off purpose?
• Would a remedial class on having an impact and leaving a legacy help?

The dying have a message

Australian hospice nurse, Bronnie Ware, for many years has spent time with patients who are in the last few weeks of their lives and who have gone home to die.  In her article “Regrets of the Dying, she shares the five most common regrets that they expressed in their final days:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Regret #1 was by far the most common.

For many, the call to break out and be true to oneself while progressing into the second half/third stage of life intensifies and, at the same time, becomes increasingly difficult.

Most of this inertia is rooted in – wait for it – F-E-A-R.

False Expectations Appearing Real.

Want a few of those false expectations?  How many of these have NOT run through your mind?

• I’d like to have my own business, but 90% of new businesses fail.
• I have a voice, but who would be interested in what I have to say?
• There’s already too much competition for what I want to write/sell/teach/build/consult.
• I’d be foolish to put my retirement nest egg at risk.
• I’m not sure I have the energy to break away and do what I really want to do.
• My age is too much of a disadvantage in this youth-oriented society.
• I might lose all my friends.
• I’d be putting my family at risk.
• I have no idea how to find this “purpose” thing.

In my free ebook “Achieve Your Full Life Potential”,  I relate a story about my own hard-headedness in this area.

The condensed version is that 30+ years ago, in my mid-40’s, I participated in a “spiritual gifts” analysis with a Bible-study group I was part of – a series of questions that purported to isolate what one was best “wired-up” spiritually to be doing with his or her life.

Mine came back as “pastor.”

My response.  Repulsion and sarcastic laughter.  C’mon! I’m a successful sales guy in telecom knocking down a comfortable six-figures.  No way – but thanks for playing!

Humility can be a b*^ch!

Years later, I ran into a thing called “Strengthsfinder”, developed by the Gallup organization and explained and administered through a book entitled “Now Discover Your Strengths”.  I took the test.  The analysis of my strengths was equally repulsive and, in my state of mind at the time, as off-mark as the pastor tag.

But, surprisingly similar.

Not accepting the results, I took the Strengthsfinder test again a year later – same results.  Still pastory.

Same derisive, sarcastic rejection on my part.

It’s an embarrassing confession, but I took the test a third time, this time following the publication of their new book, “Strengthsfinder 2.0”, assuming that they had gotten smarter with their testing.  It was a time when I was battling a debilitating sense of being off-purpose.

Same results. Still sounding an awful lot like “pastor.”

OK, God.  Got my attention.

The organized-religion community is fortunate and grateful that I didn’t pursue the pastorate.  And so am I.  But I am grateful that my tree was finally shaken enough to begin to acknowledge and move in the direction of my strengths/calling/purpose – pick the word that works best for you.  It was all three for me.

My extended Strengthsfinder trip revealed, each time, these five dominant talents:

• Learner – I’m energized by the steady, deliberate journey from ignorance to competence. Hence the insanity of having read over 600 books over the last 12 years with less than a half-dozen novels in the mix.
• Input – I find lots of things interesting, collect factoids and don’t throw any of them away, physically or mentally. (Please never come to my home office!  And now you can understand why I seem to be in perpetual confusion, flitting around like a fart on a hot skillet.)
• Intellection – I like to think, stretch my brain muscles in different directions. I’m my own best companion and I’m constantly discontent comparing what I am doing with all the stuff rattling through my head.  (All you ADD/ADHD’s out there can relate, huh?)
• Connectedness – things happen for a reason and I’m part of something much bigger than lil ‘ol me. MUCH bigger.
• Includer/Harmony (seem to tie for a spot in the top five) – I steer away from confrontation and toward harmony and I rest on the conviction that fundamentally we are all the same.

So, what does one do with all this?  Well, for starters, few will be this unbalanced and long in their search, thankfully.  But for me, it turned on the lights and helped me acknowledge the “essential self” Martha Beck writes about.  I’m meant to write, teach, coach, encourage, speak, share my accumulation and perhaps, in a small way and on a rare occasion, inspire some to move to the truth of that “fearful and wonderful world within”.

It’s a journey started slowly in my mid-sixties, intensifying in my mid-seventies.  And I recognize it as one with no finish line.  My choice is to be excited about it or to be frustrated by it.  The culture-induced path of least resistance is to simply say “it’s too late to be growing” and settle back into comfort, convenience, comparison and complacency and wait for the end, which I now know would come sooner were I to succumb.

So, as I write, I’m a confessing “bad-ass, obnoxious, sarcastic, audacious-ager” intent on sliding home at 100 or later like Pete Rose slid into second!  My ”fearful and wonderful life within” means I have a voice and the messy story that has been my life is my message, warts and all.

Maybe, just maybe, there is a pearl in that mess that will spark a mid-lifer to seek, or acknowledge, their essential self and take it to the marketplace and leave a footprint.

Hey, I get it if not much of this resonates!  Thanks for enduring the trip.  But if you took this diatribe this far, I’m thinking something is stirring.  I hope you won’t stuff it back in.