“IT’S NOT ABOUT ME”

I used to be a guy who thought he knew the answers. I knew what needed to be done, how it had to be done, and most importantly -- who can, and will get it done.

Ante up a bit -- I knew what I wanted. And what I wanted, I just went for. And more often than not, what I went for, I would get. The past few years have been relatively, blessedly glitch-free. In fact, it created a stable enough springboard for me to muster enough courage and jump into this new life of mine.

But God had other plans. And He dealt me a major blow, a major loss.

The last time I dealt with loss several years ago, I discovered a formulaic template to get out of my funk. It opened me up to an explosion of life, to rediscovering a wider, greater sphere. It was easy to drown myself in new experiences, dream new dreams, meet and re-meet people; All I had to do was get out the door and boom, the outside world was waiting.

But there’s the rub. Because this time around, the same old formula just isn’t going to cut it; it’s a different situation, and I’m a different person altogether. As I said in a previous blog, everything I know is wrong.

If before I was unleashed to run outwards, then this recent experience has me backed into a corner, forcing me to go entirely the opposite direction and dig inward; I’ve had to go to my core.

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What if you thought the world was all yours for the taking, but then you’re bonked and you’re forced to realize that you’ve got nothing, have nothing, am nothing?

When the bliss of sleep remains beyond reach, and you’re up in the middle of the night grappling with your inner demons; when you’re debating – nay, arguing - with God, you begin to realize that you’ve got nothing in this world. There’s literally nothing you can hold onto that’s truly, truly yours. Not even the shirt on your back.

Even worse, when things stop making sense and you turn a deaf ear even to the stillness of night, you’re faced with the harsh reality that you are utterly, utterly alone. It’s that eerily familiar feeling when everyone’s already asleep and you’re the only one tossing and turning in bed. But it’s also that unintuitive, unfamiliar feeling when you’re right smack in the middle of a crowd and you still feel so much desolation, totally cut off, so miserably alone.

EBTG -- Everything But The Girl -- had a song for this. The ‘Walking Wounded’.

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I had quite a long breakfast with Fr. Ted the other week, and he said that this was going to be a glorious period in my life. Easy for him to say, I thought to myself. The 'why'’s escaped me then, but he was actually excited for me. Apparently, this will be a time that I’ll be chiseled, formed, reformed.

Now all this stuff would be such a beautifully romantic notion - if all this would happen without pain. But you see, pain is not only part and parcel of the equation, it’s actually the chisel.

We are by nature pain-averse. And if there’s an easier way out, we’d naturally take it. But if we really want to grow from the shitstorms in our life, then we’ve got to stand up to the in-your-face truth that the only way out is through.

You have to muddle and feel your way through the darkness. You don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel, but you believe that it’s there. You trust that it’s there. You have faith that it’s there.

To quote something I picked up this morning --- the only faith more powerful than waiting with hope, is waiting for hope.

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If there’s one thing the chisel has taught me, it’s this --- it was never about me.

I’ve got big dreams and wild ambitions --- though hopefully (I’m slightly apologetic here) tempered by the right intentions. But then again, it doesn’t change the fact that I’ve still got way too much pride in my stew.

But the pain of grief and loss lacerates all that away from you. Chops away your pride. Shakes your confidence. Makes you question what you have, who you are. And once the well’s all dried out, that’s when you see what you’re really made of. What you’ve got at your very core.

It’s actually when you hit the bottom of the barrel that you have to rebuild everything, literally from the ground up. And as you dream it all up again, it comes alive in different colors.

Don’t get me wrong, the dream remains the same. But what drives the dream, how we view the dream, can be different altogether.

It's not about us, it's not about you, it's not about me. It's about something bigger than all of us.

i'm truly humbled, yet not one bit less hungry. At least now i know where the appetite is coming from.

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The Lord works from the inside out. The world works from the outside in. The world would take people out of the slums. Christ takes the slums out of people, and then they take themselves out of the slums. The world would mold men by changing their environment. Christ changes men, who then change their environment. The world would shape human behavior, but Christ can change human behavior.

- Ezra Taft Benson

THE INVITATION
Oriah Mountain Dreamer
From PDI/15 Feb 1998

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for,
And if you dare to dream
Of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk
Looking like a fool for love,
For your dreams, for the adventure
of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets
are squaring your moon.
I want to know if you have touched
The center of your own sorrow
If you have been opened by life’s betrayals or
Have become shriveled and closed
From fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain,
Mine or your own
Without moving to hide it
Or fade it or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy,
Mine or your own,
If you can dance with wildness
And let the ecstasy fill you
To the tips of your fingers and toes
Without cautioning us
To be careful, to be realistic, or to remember
The limitations of being human.

It doesn’t interest me if the story
You tell me is true,
I want to know if you can disappoint another
To be true to yourself,
If you can bear the accusation of betrayal
And not betray your own soul.
I want to know if you can be faithful
And therefore be trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see beauty
Even when it is not pretty every day,
And if you can source your life from God’s presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure,
Yours and mine,
And still stand at the edge of the lake
And shout to the silver
Of the full moon, “Yes!”

It doesn’t interest me how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
After the night of grief and despair,
Weary and bruised to the bone, and
Do what needs to be done for the children.

It doesn’t interest me who you are,
How you come to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
In the center of fire with me
And not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what
Or with whom you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you
From the inside
When all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself,
And if you can truly like
The company you keep
In the empty moments.

"You've got to dream up the world you want to live in. You've got to dream out loud." - U2, "Zooropa"

EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG

Lately, I’ve been thinking that maybe there’s something more useful than the art of learning. It’s the art of unlearning.

Our paradigms are shaped by a hodgepodge of things: the experiences of our past, all the junk we’ve fed our brains, our perspective of the future. All these things guide how we think, what we say, how we act.

Going through the daily grind called life, at some point we begin to settle into auto-pilot mode. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. What has worked before, will work again. What we’ve learned can be consistently applied - time and time again - and you will get more or less the same result.

Pretty much until these past few weeks, I thought I had it all figured out.

But life has its way of smacking your head with a brick, if only to knock some sense into your head and hammer you into shape. You can scenario-plan every possible occurrence, but there will always be things that will sneak up under your radar. Sometimes, there are things that you actually saw coming – giving leeway for mental preparation --- but the reality of it finally happening will jolt you nonetheless.

At the end of the day, there are no magic formulas, sure-win strategies, no secret sauce, that will guarantee success time and time again. Because reality and context will change from situation to situation. Life is rooted in time, and time is rooted in fluidity. As such, everything you do must be constantly anchor itself in the reality of the present. It needs an objective assessment of “what the hell is goin’ on?”.

So what to do when the proverbial shit hits the fan?

One of my favorite thoughts ever goes like this: “The event is not important. But the response to the event is everything.” Let me repeat that for emphasis --- “The event is not important, but the response to the event is everything.”

Greater than the ability to plan is the ability to adapt; and to adapt quickly to the present moment. Now, I’m not saying we should stop planning - people close to me know how fervently I plan my life. But plans are useless if we’re bogged down by our paradigms and mindsets and comfort zones that might no longer work.

Plans are the lighthouse, the general direction and aspiration. In times of crisis, more than ever we need to stay firmly rooted and stay the course. But we have to accept that conditions will change and we might need to zigzag a bit – at times, take a few steps back even – just to end up to where we want to go. Reality’s harsh, but embracing the setbacks that come your way is literally the only option you’ve got.

But then again, the eternal optimist in me believes that setbacks are like slingshots. They create tension, pull you back, stretch you to your limit, only to finally release you on a higher, greater trajectory. They can actually push you farther and faster to where you want to go.

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All these thoughts are brewing in my head because what I’m sharing is what I’m going through right now, a period of transition. I’m breaking away from my past – literally on different levels, both in the corporate life and more personal matters.

The past few days, I’ve returned everything I used to have in my corporate life. I’ve said goodbye to my cubicle, the high-plan XDA, the laptop, the car, the parking slot. It kinda hit my gut a bit, the fact that I’ve now got no job title, no stability; it’s almost as if a part of my identity died.

But this is exactly part of the process of unlearning. Of letting go. Of shedding one’s skin. Of emptying to ready oneself for renewal. Of recharting trajectories, of going for your own personal lighthouse.

Now, I’ve got seven years of corporate programming I need to put at the backseat for awhile in order to start anew. Because it’s a whole new ballgame, with all new rules. And it means i have to be ready to relearn everything, if needed, all over again. Because it could very well be that everything I know is wrong.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then the flow and motion of life and all the baggage it entails is the root of personal reinvention.

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“Knowledge, experience, and theory have limitations : no amount of thinking in advance can prepare you for the chaos of life, for the infinite possibilities of the moment. The great philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz called this “friction”: the difference between our plans and what actually happens.”
Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies of War