(This is the second part of To Strive or Not to Strive)

When I listen to Bilyeu and hear this oh so familiar clarion call to chase your goals with “these ten rules and this secret sauce,” I can’t help but wonder how my life has stacked up to my own dreams. I am no stranger to having caught a ‘vision’ for/of my future: the resonance I felt around teachers, speakers, and preachers even from as young as four or five; the inspiration and sense of kinship I feel when reading certain authors; the pure delight that these wordsmiths seem to forge in me; and the confirmation I received of my own abilities for writing/teaching/preaching during my time at college. But in the years since, I have had to contend with an undercurrent of panic fueled by the thought that I have somehow missed my calling, have squandered my gifts and training, and have receded into obscurity, having not filled in my spot of the grand puzzle.

I have so often flagellated my conscience for not hustling harder to make this future happen… that I have not already written my book, not already become a public speaker, not already unleashed a movement. I berate myself for getting distracted by the circumstances and the needs that those circumstances presented. Never-mind that these ‘distractions’ were that I fell in love, threw all my energies into raising a family, tried to form deep community, lived in several foreign countries and learned a few languages, followed my curiosity and my interests for designing spaces and events, worked for years for free to fulfill other people’s goals- I let them shift my focus away from pursuing this one vision of myself and my gifts!

Over the decades, I have felt the excruciating pressure of multiple longings and interests competing for my limited time and attention, and no matter which thing I focus on, feeling a sense of guilt and restlessness for neglecting the others. I have so often anxiously suffered under that sense of urgency to reach all of those goals before crossing that final finish line, before my time is up. Sometimes it seems to me that all these other needs and longings have led me down a different path entirely, have somehow stolen something from me… my future perhaps?

Compounding this dilemma, is the sad fact that I am the slowest human being alive. Implementing any one of the million ideas, the possible worlds that exist in my head, is an excruciatingly slow process. The ideas are backed up for miles and miles, each waiting impatiently for their day to be born into this time-space-matter matrix we call life. And just as waiting on too many tables always put me in the weeds and would find me in the walk-in fridge cussing and crying before the night was over, my inability to keep up with the onslaught of things going on both in my head and around me often overwhelms me. Because of this, I experience this creative process as a kind of hustle, an anxious striving, and always a race, not always against others, but always against the clock.

So the discussion that Dr. Lembke and Bilyeu have had is deeply relevant to me and touches on this irksome question about pursuing any goals of any kind, having any images at all to aim for, even as trail markers along the way, as we are guided by a worthy, universal, and truly infinite North Star. Does every image trap us in a dopamine-induced hustle for a finite identity based on a comparative/competitive measure/orientation? Is every creative idea an image casting on the pavement ahead of us, like hopscotch, that pulls us to scuttle and scurry after it? Every new thought and idea of what could be taunting the shortcomings of our current reality?

This is what I have struggled against for what seems like my whole life. The image of the idea in my head drawing the yardstick, the finish line, plum line for the reality that I struggle to make it become. The longing for a beautiful home, a worthy goal or a hustle for the hit of dopamine that status and comfort can give? The dream of a lovely garden, an expression of creativity, or a refusal to be content with things as they are? The vision for a certain kind of loving, intimate community, a new reality worth the effort and conflict, or proof of my intolerance for human fallibility? The log-jam of things to write about, raw ideas needing only the logic and language I can give them, or simply a restless spirit and an over active imagination? The impulse to preach/teach, a promise of certain contribution, or a pipe-dream that taunts me with FOMO? Change the world, or be content with the way it is? Lord knows the people telling me to leave well enough alone are stacked a mile high and more than fifty years deep.

A New Perspective

But while contemplating this conversation with Dr. Lembke and Bilyeu, I had a new thought, and for the first time I can remember, I can begin to feel the pressure lifting. This new thought rises up from a deep well I dug a long time ago and which has quietly sustained me all these years. This well is filled with the imperfect, but invaluable narrative and propositional wisdom which has been passed along through millennia like a precious family heirloom. Filtered? Worn? Problematic? Contextualized? Misappropriated? Shocking? Yes, I think so. And yet, I have always been able to trace within it, as if my finger were tracing a red thread, the very questions I ask of myself and the world today: Am I enough? Why am I here? And Where do I belong? And like a weary and bedraggled currier, it offers me a gulp of water it has smuggled through 3000 years of rough terrain, and instantly and instinctively I know that it is curative.

I am talking about the account of a shepherd boy’s rise to the throne in the Judeo/Christian traditional literature. In this narrative, when David is anointed in secret by Samuel to be king of Israel, he is still a boy tending his father’s sheep, and it isn’t until many years and many trials later that it actually came about. Joseph’s dream of ruling over his brothers is another such narrative. There are many other times the Universe seems to give people a peek into their future, though they still have a long way to go to get there, and if you are caught up on your quantum theory, it is no longer far fetched to believe this is possible. But even if the narrative is a fiction, a myth to transport a deeper truth, what is the wisdom it wants to convey? What is the medicine it offers me?

What is the message of such a future glimpse? “Here, you should strive to be king! And all of your priorities and everything you do should be oriented toward achieving this goal!”? Get yourself an MBA at King School, do these ten things and add this special sauce so you can claim your crown? I don’t think so. There is no indication in the narrative that David is being told what he should do or what should happen, but instead it relays what will happen. It is a promise. It is drawing back the curtains and saying, “look, this is in your future, for certain, so whatever else comes your way, whatever obstacles or apparent detours you may face, whatever menial chores, whatever or whoever conspires against you, whatever obligations or needs you will be asked to fulfill, don’t worry, it is not a fools errand! Because the outcome is already secured, you are free to give your full attention, commitment, and engagement to the moment by moment, the step by step of your life as it unfolds before you. You do not have to hustle for this future you have glimpsed. It already exists.”

The promise, the sneak peak, was not a finish line to ‘cross or be doomed’ with which God goaded him. It was not a Vision-carrot to increase motivation and participation in company goals. It was not a fix point of orientation around which to plot and scheme and prioritize the people, places and things of his life, so as to orchestrate that end. It was an “It is done” declaration that would be a go-to well of comfort and hope in the midst of the extraordinary hardships, challenges, and drudgery that David would face in the years that preceded his wearing the crown. Ascending the throne was not something David achieved. He became King. He grew into a sovereign able to exorcise authority on this level through a curriculum David would not have chosen nor have known to create for himself. In so far as David rose to face each of the challenges that confronted him, doing what seemed to be the right thing to do to the best of his knowledge and abilities for himself and his people (or sheep as it were) at that time, he collaborated in that process…leaving the outcomes to God, or fate, as you will.

So what if I have gotten it backwards all these years? What if this thread of longing and intuition I have had my whole life about the kind of work I should be doing, which has goaded me for as many years, was actually just a promise of what the fact of what some part of my future would look like? What if it was meant as an assurance to help me relax into my life, with all the unexpected bends and twists that it would have, and not panic about meeting the myriad of markers that are held out to us to gain “worthiness” points in this world? What if it was never meant to drive me to scurry along this yellow brick road toward some ambitious goal in the future so I will win the prize? What if instead, God was saying, this whole area is filled out already! This is who you are, past, present, and future, and it is enough! You are free to take it one step at a time, one challenge at a time, at your own pace. You are free to live in the moment of it, even while you and the universe move toward the future together in a collaborative dance. There is no hurry. There is no scarcity of time, because you will get there exactly when you need to.

Just because David was anointed King long before he would be King, God never said that is all that he will be. It is like David only got a glimpse behind the last window of the advent calendar, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t other windows, or that the same kind of chocolate would be behind every other door. Or in other words, we want to make a B-line from where we are now to some marker of success or fruitfulness on a distant horizon. We want to cut across the grass, so to speak. If we take that route, all we have from our lives is that one, well worn path and perhaps a significant amount of time being “ahead” of others and smugly waiting for them to catch up – or hoping they never do. This kind of hustle may get some somewhere faster, but almost always by externalizing the cost of their lives or denying and excluding other pressing needs. But just as disturbing, by having such a laser focus on some marker of success, we could be denying the fullness, depth, and dimension our life could have had, had we been fully present for all of it.

Life as a Spiral

What if instead of cutting across the grass, we are meant to weave a spiral out of what we’ve been given, the way one would crochet a round area rug from leftover scraps of material? Each crochet loop tightly stitched to the row that came before and the one that comes after, going around and around in a spiral, one stitch at at time. By the end, we will have a multi-colored, rich tapestry, full of unexpected things, hard things, joyful things. At any given point along our journey, we are what we have woven out of the scraps life has given us, and what we have woven forms the basis for what comes next. In this way our identity is our foundation not our orientation.

But if we were shown any one part of it, say a short stretch made from a silk tie, or worse yet, see someone else’s rug made of desirable fabric, we may come to believe that our whole rug should be made from that yellow and blue striped silk, spend our lives looking for this particular fabric, be willing to pay exorbitant prices for it, and waste all the good fabric we already had. That is the hustle. The striving.

So what could be a worthy orientation for our lives? I think to truly be a worthy North Star, it must be values that are infinite, eternal, and universal. It must give us the questions we can ask ourselves in any and every situation to help guide us. It must leave the door open for others, especially the least of these (anyone who is not/will not be instrumental to our ego-goals), to shape the answers to the question what is good at any given time. For me that leaves Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, in that order, as worthy points for a North Star. Not trying to Be Right, Good, or Beautiful (harmony of just relationships), but seeking them like water or oxygen to nourish a thirsty and gasping soul. My curiosity, my creativity, my energies, my attention, my resources, my competencies all attuned to seek and create these realities in my immediate vicinity, in others, in my circumstances, even in my enemies, as one would precious minerals, no telling where it may lead me save for the few reassuring glimpses I have tucked away in my heart. These are the magnets that draw me forward, as I stitch row for row on what came before, who I was every bit a part of who I am as the new creation I am becoming moment by moment. In this way, I weave a life that accepts the givenness of things even while I reach toward connection and grow in ways that are true and good and just for me and my neighbor.

Full Circle

The narrative in no way whitewashes David’s grave moral failings, and yet, in the final equation, it tells us that God chose David to be King because he had a heart after God’s own heart. Maybe another way of saying this is that David navigated his daily life oriented toward the North Star of the infinite, eternal, and universal principles of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, because that is what was most valuable to him. Even when looking into the mirror of truth meant seeing the ugliest things about himself and what he had done, he did not look away, nor did he expunge the public record of it. He was able to do this because he was deeply and securely grounded in the knowledge and acceptance that his past, present, and future self, his Identity, were in the hands of a power greater and more benevolent than himself, and would be enough.

Though Dr. Lembke and Bilyeu’s conversation was about understanding and moderating dopamine, the neurochemical responsible for motivation, at the heart of their exchange, I believe, is the age old duality between what is and what is not yet. The reality we are born into and the world we are creating. The centripetal forces that pull us around and around what is known, and the centrifugal forces that pull us out into that which is not yet known. To err one way is to circle in place like a broken record, to stagnate, to wither, and become irrelevant. To err the other way is to chase a mirage, dissociate, become unmoored, and be lost to chaos. I think what we are avoiding in our endless over-consumption of easy dopamine (and I am thinking of my own eating, binging, and shopping habits!) is the unique pain that each of these two forces brings with them. I wonder if the kind of balance that Dr. Anne Lembke is advocating is to allow both forces to act on our lives in a way that produces a stable but growing spiral. Not just chasing for the sake of chasing. Not just resting on our laurels, or on those that came before us. We form a solid and stable spiral by leaning into the promise and the pain of both of these forces. Facing what has come before and what is with radical honesty, embracing this imperfect reality with grace and compassion, and salvaging and curating whatever good we can with gratitude, while also allowing curiosity, creativity, and empathy to pull us outside ourselves so we may venture into the risk of failure and danger, as well as all the novel truth, goodness, and beauty that still lay waiting to be both discovered in and given to the world.