“Every journey, honestly undertaken, stands a chance of taking us toward the place where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.”
― Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation
In the suburbs of Boston, there’s lots of space. Big open houses, with big picture windows. Groomed lawns and pruned trees. Some people even leave their doors unlocked.
This is the world I grew up in, where the illusion of safety is so thick that if you make it to your teenage years unscathed, you’re desperate for some experience to break the monotony and quietude of suburban life.
But beneath that surface layer of civility and order run the same human undercurrents found in every part of the world. We are capable of love and generosity, and we are equally capable of cruelty and violence.
I’m six. It’s Thanksgiving. Our house is filled with family, more than twenty people of all ages. Aunts and uncles. Nephews and nieces. All my cousins. Throughout the night, the constant din of noise, a heady blend of laughter and shouting above the murmur of a dozen quiet conversations.
Suddenly, my uncle is shouting at my aunt. She tells him to fuck off and storms outside. He follows after her, and soon all the adults are outside, a drunken mass of shouting.
My uncle grabs at my aunt and she pulls away. Then she is on the ground. A cry goes up from the other adults as they push my uncle away and tend to my aunt.
And I sit at our big picture window, terrified, and watch.
Five years later. I’m eleven. It’s the end of the soccer season, and we’re at my coach’s house, celebrating. Pretty much everyone is outside, but I’m by myself, upstairs, at the window again, watching some of the other boys rough-housing and laughing.
Then Tim comes around from the side of the house. Tim is a loner, timid and awkward in his tall, lanky body. Five other boys circle him. ‘Come on Tim, show us your karate!’ one of them shouts. Another boy shoves him.
Tim shoves back.
Then they are on him. Tim is on the ground. The first boy, the shouter, kicks him in the stomach.
And I sit at the window, ashamed, and watch.
I knew I should do something, but I didn’t. Fortunately, the coach came running and broke it up. But the thing was, it just as easily could’ve been me. Where Tim was tall and lanky, I was overweight and shy.
We were both outsiders.
Looking back, I realize I was lucky. My parents loved me, and as I got older, I found a group of fellow outsiders, many who are still my friends today. We helped each other realize that our quirks and oddities made us special, and they helped me find laughter, joy, and my own creative spark.
Still, I wish I could go back to my six-year-old self and tell him that what happened with his family wasn’t his fault.
I wish I could go back to my eleven-year-old-self and help him do right by Tim.
I wish I could tell all my younger selves who they would become, and that together, we could help others like us too.
The paradox of wisdom — the knowledge, intuitions, and revelations that help us live life more fully and truthfully — is that it comes to us only after we’ve lived the life to earn it. This is one of time’s great compromises, I think, this exchange of youth in return for the possibility of perspective and insight.
You can’t go back again.
But you can always look back.
And when you do, you might see new ways forward.
“As a young man, I yearned for the day when, rooted in the experience that comes only with age, I could do my work fearlessly. But today, in my mid-sixties, I realize that I will feel fear from time to time for the rest of my life. I may never get rid of my fear. But I can learn to walk into it and through it whenever it rises up, naming the inner force that triggers fear. Naming our fears aloud is the first step toward transcending them.”
― Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation
Before there were satellites and driverless cars to chart the limits of the earth, mapmakers were our guides. If a path already existed, they would mark it, and, perhaps, follow it to test it for truth. When no path existed, they blazed one. And always, out beyond the edges of the map, there was the unknown, imagination rushing in to fill the void.
The unmapped world stood as an invitation.
A challenge.
A calling.
Today, despite the fact that there seems to be an answer to every question right at our fingertips, despite the fact that we could drive from Boston to San Francisco and back again without ever getting lost, more and more people exist in states of dis-ease, grappling with anxiety, depression, envy, and the pervasive fear of missing out.
We are, I think, desperate for some sign that our life matters. But when the life we’re living just can’t seem to compete with the ideals being fed to us — beauty! health! wealth! fame! travel! — we’re left chasing someone elese’s manufactured fantasies and illusions; maps that promise to bring us to hidden treasure, but in fact, lead us further and further away from our own true potential.
That’s why it’s worth reflecting not on what the mapmakers made, but on how they lived.
Because they weren’t just making maps. They were living a life. A life of purpose. Of service. Of discovery. A map is a static thing, a product of its time, its lines and limits marked out by the journey of its maker. But the world is just the opposite, always changing. Everything that was once known becomes new again as seasons turn, and fashions change, and civilizations rise and fall. Every part of the world, shifting, pulsing, growing, dying, reborn.
Which means that every mapmaker who ever set out to chart the world didn’t have a map.
Whatever they did have, if they had anything at all, was already old. Outdated. Imperfect. Unfinished. Someone else’s idea of the right way to go.
In the wilderness of the unknown, they had to make endless choices, often without adequate information. Do I go north or should I turn west? Do I follow the river inland, or stick to the coast? Do I seek the pass through the mountains, or take the long way round?
No one but themselves could answer these questions.
It was up to them to decide which way to go.
“I know people who have been stuck in doubt their entire lifetime. Each of these unfortunate individuals… came to this crossroads and found themselves rooted there, with one foot firmly planted on each side of the intersection. Alas, they never moved off the dime. They procrastinated. Dithered. Finally, they put a folding chair smack in the center of that crossroads and lived there for the rest of their lives. After a while, they forgot entirely that there even was a crossroads — forgot that there was ever a choice at all.”
― Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling
Seen from the vantage of history, every single life is a map made by the person who lived it. One trail among countless billions, marking a way from birth to death on this little blue planet circling a small yellow star on a minor spur of the great spiral of our galaxy.
There is no global positioning system in the world that can show you the life you were meant to live before you live it. Each of us has our own path to make. And the map won’t be finished until we are.
But if we don’t know where we’re going until we get there, what navigational tools should we use? In his excellent book, The Great Work of Your Life, psychotherpaist and yogic scholar Stephen Cope explores this paradox through his study of the Bhagavad Gita, an ancient Hindu text, and the concept of dharma.
Loosely put, dharma is the idea that every being is part of the web of existence, and we each have our role to play to sustain and enhance that web.
Dharma is, in other words, the life only you can live.
“If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s path.”
— Joseph Campbell
The process of identifying your dharma, as Cope outlines it, is actually quite simple. It is attention coupled with action. Notice something. Act on it. Then notice again.
Does something interest you? Move towards it. Learn more about it. Practice it. As you do, pay attention. Notice whether your interest, your excitement, and your engagement increase or decrease.
Does something frighten you? Same prescription. Move towards it. Determine if your fear is true, or a sign of your own resistance to change.
Does something anger you? Yup, you guessed it. Take action. Then pay attention. Ask yourself why? Where does it come from? Do I need to stay this way?
“Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth”
― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times
It’s important not to confuse simple with easy. The easy thing would be to just stay where you are. To ignore the mountains in the distance and maybe just have a beer and watch TV. Which is why, as we start to mine our lives for answers, fear and doubt come rushing in. Our own inner voices and the voices of the world will always urge us to play it safe, to be careful. Keep your head down and don’t rock the boat.
But if you find yourself hungry for change — if you hear a quiet voice amidst the all that fearful noise saying ‘but this isn’t enough anymore. I can’t keep living this way’ — then know that you don’t need a map.
You just need to start walking.
The most important point here is to remain curious about yourself and the way you relate to the world, keeping an open heart and an open mind. You are discarding certainty (I already have the map) and replacing it with inquiry (why am I afraid? and where might I go next?) You are discerning the shape of the web around you — the myriad possibilities for living — and marking out your own place in it. Like a bloodhound on the trail of a scent, you are following your inner experience from one moment to the next until patterns start to appear.
These patterns are the emergent shape of you.
You don’t need to embrace Hinduism as a worldview to appreciate the utility of this process (though you’re certainly welcome to). You simply need to embody the mapmaker’s spirit. If you want to map the mountains, you have to hike into them. Whether you get to the top or decide to turn back is totally up to you.
But you won’t know it until you start the journey.
“Never follow anyone else’s path… unless you’re in the woods and you’re lost and you see a path. Then by all means follow that path.”
— Ellen DeGeneres
Of course, sometimes the mountains are shrouded in fog. Or maybe night comes before you make it down, and all you have is the moonlight to guide you. One step, then the next, then the next. As the great sage Ellen DeGeneres so wisely points out, it’s okay to use what you need to survive.
In fact, Cope argues, that’s the whole point. That’s why it’s so important to pay attention. Life isn’t always a process of joyful, interesting, exciting discovery. All too often, it’s more like walking the woods at night, with only a flashlight to guide you. Sometimes it’s too dark to even see the mountains in the distance. Sometimes all you can see is ten feet in front of you.
And when we’re feeling our way through the darkness, it’s the small signs — the game trail that leads to running water, the distant light that might be camp fire or a candlelit window, the star Polaris emerging from behind the clouds to point the way north — that make all the difference.
“In my own life, as winters turn into spring, I find it not only hard to cope with mud but also hard to credit the small harbingers of larger life to come, hard to hope until the outcome is secure. Spring teaches me to look more carefully for the green stems of possibility; for the intuitive hunch that may turn into a larger insight, for the glance or touch that may thaw a frozen relationship, for the stranger’s act of kindness that makes the world seem hospitable again.”
― Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation
And sometimes, you just have to wait for morning to come. The sun rises. The skies clear. The mountains you’re seeking are still there, a long ways off, glimmering in the heat of dawn.
I can’t go back to my younger self and make him any less afraid, or change the fact that he didn’t act when I wish he would have. But I can learn from his fear. I can learn from his inaction. Because he was me, and the greatest gift we can take from our past is clarity about our future.
Everytime I sit down to write one of these essays, I am trying my best to write the words my own heart longs to hear. Words that will inspire me to bridge the gap between how I live now and who I hope to be. But I am also, I think, living the words as I write them, living into that gap, leaping across it, bridge or no bridge. An effort to carve wisdom from each moment, even as I continue to travel the arc of my lifetime, however long that might turn out to be.
I am, as Antonia Machado says, attempting to ’make the road by walking.’
Wanderer, your footsteps are
the road, and nothing more;
wanderer, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
By walking one makes the road,
and upon glancing behind
one sees the path that never will be trod again.
Wanderer, there is no road–
Only wakes left on the sea.
-Antonio Machado, “Proverbios y cantares,” Campos de Castilla, 1912
Today, thanks to all I’ve been through, thanks to all I’ve seen, I have an emerging sense of my own dharma. Today, I stand for the outsiders and the loners, for the artists and the dreamers, for everyone who has something to offer to the world, but because they are too afraid, or too alone, or too oppressed, never take the first step.
I’m writing for Andy Cahill, age 6, age 11, age 36. I forgive you. And I’m grateful to you. And I believe in you.
And I’m writing for Tim. I’m sorry I didn’t speak up when I should have. I hope you are finding your way through the world. Know that you are not alone.
And I’m writing for my daughter, Saoirse, 2 months old, a whole lifetime of possibility ahead of her. Learn what you can from your elders, my little one, because we all love you very much. Then, when the time comes, make your own map.
And, if you’re reading this, then I’m writing for you.
“Every crack is also an opening. When in the midst of great change, it is helpful to remember how a chick is born. From the view of the chick, it is a terrifying struggle. Confined and curled in a dark shell, half-formed, the chick eats all its food and stretches to the contours of its shell. It begins to feel hungry and cramped. Eventually, the chick begins to starve and feels suffocated by the ever-shrinking space of its world. Finally, its own growth begins to crack the shell, and the world as the chick knows it is coming to an end. Its sky is falling. As the chick wriggles through the cracks, it begins to eat its shell. In that moment — growing but fragile, starving and cramped, its world breaking — the chick must feel like it is dying. Yet once everything it has relied on falls away, the chick is born. It doesn’t die, but falls into the world.”
― Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have
Did this post speak to you? If so, help me build an audience by clapping as many times as you like (you can clap up to 50 times for a post & more claps = more visibility on Medium) and spread the word by sharing this post with your friends and colleagues on social media.
← Click over here (web) or the button down below (mobile) to clap & share!
Want wisdom and reflections straight to your inbox? Sign up for The Wonder Dome newsletter.
Want to go further down the rabbit hole? Here’s some additional reading:
