Throughout human history, it seems we have often created a world that emphasizes external success more than internal satisfaction. We live in a time and place where the pursuit of happiness is our mostly exclusive goal.
From the cradle to the grave, we teach our children, and they teach their children ad infinitum through generations, that life success is defined by achievement, accumulation of goods, and wealth. We pay our verbal homage to life goals like internal peace, inner joy, and self- wisdom, but we all secretly know the trophy is for those who are able to keep achieving. Our goal is the glory of winning. Anything else is simply settling for a participation ribbon. Winners do not settle.
We all look around and see the quest for external happiness by very successful people everywhere. Our egos naturally want some of that. We have always been taught we should want some of that. There is a clearly identified path as to how we get it. Everyone else seems to be pursuing it. So, we enter the water without reluctance. We swim the swim the way we have been taught. We make the dive looking for the gold, hoping there is the hidden treasure. The riches in the sunken ship that we have been promised must be down there if only we will keep diving deeper and holding our breath longer. We do this month by month, moment by moment.
Soon we are sitting on the water’s edge one day, almost 80, looking back on our life. We are wondering where it went, pondering why it went so fast, and asking ourselves was there any meaning to it.
Whatever analogy or metaphor we may want to use, most of us recognize the patterns here. And many of us feel but do not easily verbalize the true sense of existential nothingness and loss that such patterns and paths have led us to. It is like we are captive in a revolving circle that we have made ourselves, which we know we need to escape, but we are either unsure how to or uncertain that we really want to. The seduction of the gold, the call of the success, the songs and praise are not easily ignored for those who are taught relentlessly this is what life is all about. Losers put down their shovels and winners keep digging deep.
And yet, sometimes for some of us, the circle stops spinning. No longer does the dive seem worth it. No more do we want to make the swim or participate in the pursuit. We simply do not have to win the race anymore. We have dug deep enough, and it really is time to lay our shovels down.
We come to understand that we live in a nice enough house though not the best house. We drive a reliable car even if it is not the greatest car. Our partner is aging but still so beautiful. Our bones may be aching, but they still seem to work. Our clothes are sometimes torn, our status diminished, and our bruises perhaps evident to everyone, but we are more fulfilled than before. Somehow, we discover that we have already found what we were looking for because one day we just quit looking in all the wrong places.
We no longer strive for the goals we used to think were so important. We understand things in a way that we did not before. When this happens, people around us are puzzled. He could have taught anywhere, and he is teaching at that school? She could have had anything she wanted in life with her looks and ability and look what she has now. The neighbors next door just seemed to drop out and quit coming to galas, stopped coming to the money events, and we don’t know what happened.
The fact is this does happen to some of us. Sometimes the success driven man puts down his sword and sues for internal peace. Those number of dollars he must have in his head no longer are in his heart. Sometimes the woman seeking a perfect body and smoother skin finds it is more important to look inside for what she longs for. We cannot ignore nor deny that the star athlete sometimes abandons his glorified sports status in pursuit of something he did not find on the field of play.
When anyone changes their life emphasis like this, the why and the how usually seems complicated and a bit mysterious to the rest of us who have not. We ask ourselves why this happened. We wonder how this person came to a place most of us do not seem to want to go.
I believe such change is neither a mystery nor difficult to comprehend. I think it is a product most often of one basic human experience— personal human suffering.
Noone wants to hurt inside. None of us want to feel human emotional pain that seers us to our depths. We do not want to suffer like that. But we all do. Our pain cannot be avoided. It is only in what we do with that pain and suffering that we differ. Within the experience of personal suffering a few then find the will to change their emphasis, to alter their life goals.
Some of us decide it is time to finally lay down our egos and turn away from all the striving to be the winner. And, when we do, the world around us sees us differently, perhaps with less status. But we begin to see that world differently in turn.
And we grow in unexpected and satisfying ways we never expected of ourselves.