One of the things that keeps coming back to me over and over in different situations is the realization that there is a difference between deciding what you want or what you’ll dedicate yourself to and discovering what you are dedicated to.
There are a plethora of differences, each with its own subtlety or implication but in my experience, all of them devolve from a single, central one. At least that’s the way that I discovered it in my life and that’s how I try to talk about it when it comes up and that’s how I try to teach it.
I have found that it is a hard concept, often taking years or more to fully explore. Often words are lacking for specific concepts. Sometimes it is not explored at all, instead, being rejected out of hand. In this way, it is like math or history. To be sure, it has similar power to ask the hard questions and invite, almost demand, sometimes difficult explorations to find answers to those questions.
I find that asking such questions is the most natural thing in the world. It’s as natural as breathing or walking. Small children do it naturally and universally – so much so that it has led to multiple cliches. Unfortunately, as children grow into adults, it is one of the things that they learn not to do. Also, when creative types of all stripes talk about being “childlike,” they are usually talking about the wonder, curiosity, and joy that a child welcomes the universe with. These qualities are closely related to asking questions. They are so closely related that quieting one leads to quieting them all.
This is why I was surprised to find that discovering what you’re dedicated to can be so hard. In the interests of full disclosure, let me say that I am still exploring what this means in my life, too. What I find is that the more aware I am of what is important to me and who I am in the world, the more clearly I can realize myself.
This has direct and immediate consequences. For example, the current direction of my career is one that I could not have predicted less than a year ago but it is a direct consequence of my greater insight into myself. It is a direct articulation of my answer to the direct question of what excites me.
This question had hung around for a long time, but the awareness and clarity from which the answer came is new. In this life, it came out of my second stroke and the near death experience that came with it.
I do not advocate strokes or near death experiences, but what I learned is interesting and useful. I learned that it is possible to be numb to pain. I had learned to numb pain. In fact, that was part of what I was holding on to. I was holding on to it in the name of life. I was assuming that if I felt no pain, there was no pain, no damage. It sounds silly, but that was my belief. That numbness was in me was a revelation.
Of course, healing required me to accept myself as I was. In order to do that, I had to first see myself clearly and honestly. That’s the value in realizing your numbness. There’s a difference between being numb to pain and having no pain. When you’re numb to pain, you’re numb to everything. Its like the numb part is a dead weight. You know it’s there logically. It takes up space but you can’t feel it.
When you have no pain, everything is alive. If something interacts with that part, you know it’s there even if you can’t see it. The richness of what’s available is profound and the contrast is a sharp one. That not withstanding, though, that richness is something that is often diminished and ultimately ignored by the attitude that leads to numbing.
As I healed, it became apparent that I was not alone in my numbness. The prevailing attitude seems to be that numbness is always preferable to pain. This seems to be true and is in the culture even when being simply honest about the pain can lead to healing and elimination of the cause of pain in the first place. This seems to be held as true even when simply treating symptoms and numbing yourself leads to further damage and greater pain later.
In my case, the numbness that I induced was centered around career and money. As I felt deeper and deeper into what I was numb to and why, I was able to heal it. As I healed it, I gained greater and greater clarity into my answers to hard questions. I actually asked myself those questions deliberately in order to open that space for answers.
I found that it is true that the arc of my life came clear or clearer anyway. I still had choice within that arc. I could even choose to live outside of that arc altogether. Specifically, I saw how every choice I had ever made in life was related to this arc. Ether it was a way to further explore and express it or it was a way to avoid exploring and expressing it.
That brings me back to the original question with which I opened this essay. What I realized was that the difference between deciding and discovering can be found in how much thought or logic you apply and possibly when you apply it.
It is difficult because many of society’s messages are centered on this idea, but deciding what you will dedicate yourself to (and then possibly applying discipline to stay on “the straight and narrow”) is an intellectual exercise. It is an application of logic and as such is divorced from life and you.
Discovering what you have already devoted yourself to, on the other hand, is an exploration of life and being alive. It is an expression of what excites you. You can hear it in someone’s voice when he or she is talking about what’s exciting. It’s the answer to the question, “What do you do (would you do) even though (if) you aren’t (weren’t) paid to do it?”
We are often numb to such questions so we don’t hear our answers. Often, we are afraid of the answers because we can’t see how they might lead to living financially. An old cliche is that figuring out “how” is not our job. What I have found over and over again in this life is that not only is it not my job to answer “how,” but the universe always provides a way to live. It’s my job to trust it and get out of the way.
It is like the roadrunner in the old Warner Bros. cartoons. Stepping off the cliff edge onto thin air might require faith at first, but it is rewarded. Not only does the universe catch you, it does so gracefully and painlessly. It does so in a way that not only leads to further insight and healing, it does so in a way that is also joyful.
That is a major focus of my ongoing explorations – to understand from personal experience some of the ways that discovering yourself can lead to joy and vice versa.
For more information or for personal support in exploring presence, contact me at david@dchpark.com or 412-407-7401.
© 2014, David Park. All Rights Reserved.
”Finding Your Shape” by DCH Park is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.