We Blossom into Our Fullness
When Akiba was on his deathbed, he bemoaned to his rabbi that he felt he was a failure. His rabbi moved closer and asked why, and Akiba confessed that he had not lived a life like Moses. The poor man began to cry, admitting that he feared God's judgment. At this, his rabbi leaned into his ear and whispered gently, “God will not judge Akiba for not being Moses. God will judge Akiba for not being Akiba.”
—from the Talmud
I was on the phone with Elizabeth, a middle-aged woman who had spent the last twenty-five years as an operating room nurse. She had been feeling stale for the past few years and was considering a career change. She thought she might go back to school, a move that would cost her about $20,000. But something didn't feel right about it, so she called me. I asked her what school would give her in terms of opportunities that she didn't have now. She said she'd always heard that education opens many doors. Then I asked if she had ever enjoyed school. “Only as a means to an end,” she said. “I wish I were the kind of person who likes academics. I wish I were someone who breezed through school.”
“Hold it right there,” I said. “Wishing you were someone else is a big red flag. It only gets in the way of your becoming more yourself. What I know about you is that you are very goal oriented. Once you know what you want to go for, you put all of your energy, talent, and intelligence into getting it. That's how you got your nursing certificate, your husband, your children, and your beautiful house. Given that, does it make sense for you to go back to school?”
“Not until I know what I want to do,” she replied immediately. “So I guess my hesitation isn't procrastination, but my inner wisdom telling me this isn't right for me.”
Elizabeth is like so many of us. Without trust in ourselves, we're so full of ideas of how we are supposed to be that we don't even understand who we are. Like Akiba, we can get so obsessed with trying to be Moses that we miss out on the grand adventure of becoming ourselves. This is a terrible tragedy. Each of us is unique, and we are here to grow that uniqueness for the benefit of all. Our souls demand it—and we will not be happy unless we take this task full on.
A colleague of mine once worked with an engineering firm, helping the staff understand their team's thinking talents and how to use them on behalf of their business goals. One middle-aged gentleman stood out. His partners complained that while they admired Jim as a person, he seemed to be just “going through the motions.” When their talents were plotted, his were very different from those of the rest of the group. Jim was strong in empathy, caring for and about the feelings of others. But he spent all his days in a mechanical world. When asked how he ever became an engineer, he said it was because his high school guidance counselor said it was a good profession for him!
This story has a happy ending. Once Jim realized that he was miserable not because there was something wrong with him, but because he'd been living a life designed by his high school teacher, he became the human resources person in his firm. Spending his days helping to solve people problems, he began to blossom. He was happy because he was doing what he was meant to do, and the firm was happy because he was contributing his gifts in a useful way.
I believe it was Joseph Campbell who once said that the spiritual imperative to be ourselves is so strong that the soul would rather fail at its own life than succeed at someone else's. And the story of Akiba implies that the task of becoming fully ourselves is not only what will bring us utmost happiness, but what, in the end, our lives will be judged on. The great poet Kahlil Gibran said, “God has placed in each soul an apostle to lead us upon the illumined path. Yet many seek life from without, unaware that it is within them.” The more we trust ourselves, the more we are able to listen to the apostle within. This ensures we end up fully ourselves, joyfully living our own dreams and answerable for our own choices.
Choices Are Easier
One's philosophy is not best expressed in words. It is expressed in the choices one makes. And the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.
—Eleanor Roosevelt
Recently I was sitting at the end of the day in a hotel hot tub with a couple. Up came their daughter to check in—she was seven, maybe eight. I couldn't help noticing she was wearing a very provocative string bikini. When she went off to the pool, the wife asked her husband, “What do you think about that bathing suit?” He mumbled something. Silence for a few minutes. Then she asked again, explaining that her daughter had picked it out herself. Again he said something noncommittal. Five minutes later, she returned to it again: “But as a father, how do you feel about your daughter wearing that suit? I mean, this is the time we need to set standards.”
I left at that point, afraid if I didn't, I would blurt out something it was not my place to say. Talk about not trusting yourself! The woman obviously knew in her heart of hearts that the bathing suit was inappropriate but had given in to her daughter. Now she was practically begging her husband to veto her choice. It was clear that if he didn't put his foot down, she would continue to ignore her own sense of what was right.
Life is crammed full of choices. Indeed, one could say that our lives are comprised of the choices we make on a daily basis. And we must make them in the midst of all kinds of pressures—pressures from kids who want certain things, money pressures, time pressures. Then there's the pressure to sort through all the data to make the right choice among all the options out there.
A recent study revealed that twenty thousand new products are released every year and that having too many choices is making us unhappy. As author Robert Kanigel puts it, “While choices multiply, we stay pretty much the same. Our bodies and minds remain the bottleneck through which choice must pass. We still have the brains our forebears did, still only twenty-four hours a day to use them. We still need time and energy to listen, look, absorb, distinguish, and decide. . . . Each choice saps energy, takes time, makes a big deal out of what isn't.”
I was struck by the reality of this conundrum the other day. I just happened to notice the covers of two magazines: Bride and Modern Bride. Bride was trumpeting 704 pages of wedding dresses; Modern Bride, 512. If you bought both, you could look at 1,216 pages of dresses. Just thinking about that nauseates me.
When we trust ourselves, we don't need to look at 1,216 pages of dresses, unless, as with my friend Chloe, it gives us pleasure to do so. We don't need to agonize over decisions or second-guess ourselves endlessly or look to others, like the mom in the pool, for validation or limit setting. We know that we can live through the consequences of our choices without beating ourselves up because we believe, as psychologist John Enright says, that “you always chose right, given the resources you had.” Even if that mother had, in a moment of weakness, given in to her daughter, with self-trust she could decide to reverse her decision once she realized she had made a mistake.
Choice is about the capacity to make our wishes known, to ourselves or others, act on that knowledge, and then deal with the consequences and revise if necessary. Trusting ourselves allows us to do that more swiftly, comfortably, and with less regret. Given the number of choices we must make in a day, that's no small gift!
We Don't Have to Worry So Much
How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened.
—Thomas Jefferson
The mother of one of Ana's classmates organized an “end of the school year” party at a park. The weather had been atrocious all month, but that Saturday it was warm and sunny,