There’s something that I’ve come to call “The Law of Mutual Aliveness,” and it’s been a common thread among the people I’ve talked with (and within my own journey).
“The Law of Mutual Aliveness” is as simple as this: Find ways to evolve upon your experiments in ways that bring both you and others alive.
If you focus just on yourself– you feel alive when you paint! You feel alive when you run! You feel alive when you’re closing sales like a muthaf%^er!– that’s great. But in order to get paid for doing anything, you need to be truly serving and creating value for others.
That’s great if you feel alive when you paint, but does it bring value to others– value that they’re willing to pay for?
And that’s great if you feel alive when you close sales, but are you selling something that truly values others, or are you focusing only on yourself?
In order to experience genuine fulfillment– and in order to get paid for your work– make sure you’re paying attention to The Law of Mutual Aliveness.
How can you marry the two– your aliveness and the aliveness of others?
I haven’t ever met a single truly fulfilled person who hasn’t adhered to this law.
Stop focusing on what YOU want and instead seek to become what you seek.
It’s not unlike dating: if you want to find a man (or a woman) who’s kind, compassionate, interesting, intelligent, honest, loyal, and so on and so forth, that’s great.
But what do you have to offer?
Instead of being a whiny complainer and talking about how you can’t find someone who fits the bill, why don’t you work on becoming kind, compassionate, interesting, intelligent, honest, and loyal yourself?
Why don’t you work on becoming the type of person who would be attractive to a person who possesses those qualities you seek?
Same thing with the world of work: If you want work that’s more interesting and more creative, focus on becoming a genuinely interesting person and doing creative things.
If you want a job with more autonomy and more flexibility, focus on demonstrating that you deservethese things. Are you working on becoming someone who’s diligent and hardworking and trustworthy?
Work hard to become that which you seek.
Meaning and purpose doesn’t have to be big and overarching. You don’t need to build orphanges in Africa or feed the poor in order to find meaning (although you can do that if you want to).
You can find meaning and purpose every day, in anything and everything you’re already doing.
All you have to do is respond to this person, this challenge, this deed:
“Caretake this moment. Immerse yourself in its particulars. Respond to this person, this challenge, this deed. Quit evasions. Stop giving yourself needless trouble. It is time to really live; to fully inhabit the situation you happen to be in now.”
– Epictetus
Happiness and fulfilment doesn’t come from discovering that one perfect pursuit.
It comes from living now, from finding meaning now, from living in such a way that our deepest values are reflected in our everyday lives. The more we can find purpose and joy in this moment, we stop thinking about exactly where we’re headed or what we “should” be doing and we just do. We just be.
Here are a few of my articles that expand upon this idea:
A painter sits down to paint, unsure of what he’s about to create– all he knows is something wants (needs?) to come through him.
And so he begins from this place of not knowing– one brushtroke, then another, then another, not knowing quite what form the finished product will take. With each brushstroke, the big picture comes together a little bit more… with joy and presence and intentionality, he continues to paint, bit by bit by bit.
He began with a blank canvas, an empty mind, and a single brushstroke.
He ended with a masterpiece.
As I explain in my post, The Derek Zoolander Guide to Finding yourself:
Believe it or not, Derek Zoolander did not find his way into awesomeness overnight. He didn’t just shoot out of bed one day and morph into Awesome Derek in all his gloriousness.
No. Way.
Before Derek found his way, he had to first undergo an intense and sucky period of questioning.
“Who am I?” he lamented in a mud puddle after losing the “Male Model of the Year” award to stupid Hansel.
He left home to search for his roots, venturing deep into the coal mines and catching the black lung.
He was disowned by his father and brothers for being a merman.
His dear friends died in a freak gasoline fight accident.
He didn’t know how to turn left.
And to top it all off, he was the target of Mugatu’s plan to assassinate the Prime Minister of Micronesia (and you thought YOU had it bad!).
So what’s the point?
If we want to become who we truly are, we, too must go through this period of losing ourselves, of feeling utterly and completely lost and confused, of having all of the questions and none of the answers.
In order to find ourselves, we must first lose ourselves.
The forgetting is a part of the remembering.
The difficulty is a part of the process.
Did you catch that?
The difficulty is a necessary part of the process.
Which is why, if you’re feeling lost and confused right now, I’m actually going to CONGRATULATE you.
CONGRATULATIONS!
You, my friend, are right on track.
Not knowing who you are– asking questions– feeling lost– like it or not, these are the perfect signs that you’re well on your way.
And as author Parker J. Palmer explains:
Most of us arrive at a sense of self and vocation only after a long journey through alien lands. But this journey bears no resemblance to the trouble-free “travel packages” sold by the tourism industry. It is more akin to the ancient tradition of pilgrimage — “a transformative journey to a sacred center” full of hardships, darkness, and peril.
In the tradition of pilgrimage, those hardships are seen not as accidental but as integral to the journey itself. Treacherous terrain, bad weather, taking a fall, getting lost — challenges of that sort, largely beyond our control, can… make space for true self to emerge. If that happens, the pilgrim has a better chance to find the sacred center he or she seeks. Disabused of our illusions by much travel and travail, we awaken one day to find that the sacred center is here and now — in every moment of the journey, everywhere in the world around us, and deep within our own hearts.
But before we come to that center, full of light, we must travel in the dark. Darkness is not the whole of the story — every pilgrimage has passages of loveliness and joy — but it is the part of the story most often left untold. When we finally escape the darkness and stumble into the light, it is tempting to tell others that our hope never flagged, to deny those long nights we spent cowering in fear.
The experience of darkness has been essential to my coming into selfhood, and telling the truth about that fact helps me stay in the light. But I want to tell that truth for another reason as well: many young people today journey in the dark, as the young always have, and we elders do them a disservice when we withhold the shadowy parts of our lives. When I was young, there were very few elders willing to talk about the darkness; most of them pretended that success was all they had ever known. As the darkness began to descend on me in my early twenties, I thought I had developed a unique and terminal case of failure. I did not realize that I had merely embarked on a journey toward joining the human race.
– Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak
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Next: Move on to Section 7.3: Even More Tidbits of E & E Goodness!