THE NONLINEAR PATH 13: Looking For The Path You Are Already On
Learnings From An Old Saying And A Nowhere Man
I’ve been thinking a lot these days about my path in both career and life, especially after turning fifty. It truly does seem to be something we start to do in mid-life as we reassess and realign for the next half of our journey… if we are fortunate.
Even though I would classify myself as a creative introvert, I do enjoy spending large amounts of time talking deeply with others about topics such as this. The subject of where we are, how we got here, and where we should go next invariably enters the conversation, particularly post-pandemic when each of us is re-evaluating our lives and the things that are truly important to us.
He’s got to follow his own path. No one can choose it for him. - Princess Leia Organa, Star Wars A New Hope
Fight Your Own Fight, Forge Your Own Path
Like many of my colleagues, I am now middle-aged, and pairing all the craziness that comes with being middle-aged with the COVID upheaval creates a potent blend of anxiety, self-doubt, and overall taking stock. In conversations, I often hear things like 'I wonder if I am on the right path'. 'How can I find my path'? 'I need to get back on my path'. 'What might have happened if I had taken this or that path? Or didn’t….'?
Statements like these are puzzling but familiar to me having also grown up with the advice to find my path as if it were some yellow brick road already laid out just waiting for me to locate it and follow it to some glorified end.
Most of us grow up with possible life and career pathways presented to us via our families, teachers, leaders, and culture. Our lives seem almost predetermined: go to school, get good grades, choose a college, get a job, find a partner, buy a car, a home, a dog, have kids, and then school, college, retirement, smaller home, motor home, nursing home. We have countless examples of this basic life template.
We do have others, too. Lots of others. However, all these previously-honed pathways have one major problem. They aren’t our own.
Instead of trying to find our path perhaps we should focus on forging our path.
Try to take on the path of another person, parent, mentor, teacher, famous actor, or musician. Choose one and follow it. Hopefully, you’ll like where it leads. Perhaps success will find you along the way. Maybe you’ll hate it but will be so far down the road you won’t want to turn back (sunk costs, anyone?). Maybe you’ll choose one but be constantly dogged by a parallel path that looks far more interesting (ah, those grasses look so much greener over there).
Perhaps you will choose a path that has led others to success but no matter how closely you follow it, success eludes you, leaving you bitter and resentful. Whatever the case, the idea of choosing a path already forged by someone else now seems utterly ridiculous, especially after decades of training in martial arts where I was taught to find and develop my own strengths, to fight my own fight. To walk my own path.
What does that mean? How do we walk our own path when we don’t know where to go and when so many people are waiting in the wings to call out judgment or criticism at every turn we make? Our parents push us down certain paths because they are afraid and want to protect us. Our cultures try to dictate proper paths so that we may become the right contributors society thinks it needs. Breaking free, risking abandonment, and truly walking our own path is hard enough. Once we decide to do so, how do we know where to go? How do we find something that doesn’t already exist?
Instead of trying to find our path, perhaps we should focus on forging our path.
Accept, Breathe, Flow, Don’t Be Concerned With Outcomes
In the martial art I have trained for the past thirty-plus years, one of the first mantras we learn is 'breathe, flow, don’t be concerned with outcomes'. Accept was added at one point to help teach us to accept where we are in any given moment: to be where we are, not where we think we should be.
Humans tend to be competitive, to fit in and be equal, to keep up and not fall behind. So we look at others and compare ourselves to find some way to feel normal. It is all perception and ultimately folly because we only see what is on the surface from our singular point of view and through our own filters. We have no idea what is going on with another person but we tend to judge it by our own standards. And when we look at others and judge ourselves through our perceptions of those standards, we miss the most important thing: what is happening inside ourselves.
Self-acceptance is not about staying where you are, without growth or change. Acceptance is a way of getting centered within oneself.
Self-acceptance is not about staying where you are without growth or change. Acceptance is the opposite of denial. Accepting ourselves and where we are in the moment is a way of being present without judgment so that we can look objectively at who we are and where we are, assess how we got here, and then be in a clear state of mind to develop a plan to move in a direction we want to go. Acceptance is a way of getting centered within oneself.
So as martial artists, we start by accepting ourselves, our limitations, gifts, and all, in that moment as we step onto the floor to train, fight, and teach. Then we breathe so that we can flow like water through whatever may come. It is by not being concerned with the outcome that we release the destination and focus on the journey. Just like our path in life, there is no final destination we can guarantee we arrive at. There is no result we can make happen. There is only the experience of showing up for our own journey.
The Journey Is The Destination
At a very young age, I was touched heavily by John Lennon’s song Nowhere Man, the final song written for their 1965 album, Rubber Soul and featured in the 1968 animated Beatles film, Yellow Submarine.
John was struggling to come up with a final meaningful song to finish the album. After 5 hours of laboring, he gave up. Laying down on the studio floor the song came to him, just flowed out of him. He had been wrestling with finding direction and meaning in his own life. Nowhere Man would be one of the first Beatles songs to not be completely about love and romance. It is about a man’s search for meaning.
The character in the film, Jeremy Hillary Boob, is a man so consumed with following every path available. He is a man filling himself with knowledge and skill without direction. Jeremy is ultimately depicted as ice-skating on concentric circles, on an endless loop to nowhere until Ringo invites him to join their quest into the unknown. Which he does with sheer excitement.
What struck me while watching the film more recently, as I thought about pathfinding, was how John, Paul, George, and Ringo were depicted moving through white space with the world seemingly opening up behind them, being created as they went along. It perfectly illustrates the idea that our future is unwritten. It is a blank canvas with our road unfolding behind us as we move through life. Therefore revealing that our own true path is the one beneath our feet. We can never be off our path or veer away from it because we are the ones creating it. It develops under our feet wherever we choose to step.
Knowing this, we can start to accept that we are always on the right path. We can then focus on where we want to forge that path forward. I like this concept because it puts us in the driver's seat of our own lives and holds each of us accountable. Some may find that terrifying. I find it liberating.
Searching For The Donkey One Is Already Riding On
There is a saying that it's the height of stupidity to look for the donkey that you are already riding on. I had come halfway around the world looking for places that existed mostly in my mind, and while I didn't find what I'd expected, I did find that I was riding on that donkey all along. - Mark Salzman, martial artist, author, actor in Iron & Silk
A path that already exists is another’s journey. They may have had a good experience with it or not. Either way, you cannot know what experience you’ll have if you follow that same road. If they had success and you don’t you may become resentful and judge yourself, inaccurately. However, if you follow and create your own way there is no comparison, no judgment, just pure experience.
Others may judge you for being on your own path because they are looking for some measure of success to see where you might be. Having no way to track our progress feels scary. But how wonderfully freeing to not have to track the progress of life, to live up to an image of success, to be able to live as we wish and be OK with just being. Social media fucks with that heavily, being a grossly fake measure of life and success. There is no right path, anyway, just perceived ones.
You may look to another path to see if you like it. You may choose to join in lockstep with it and move in the same direction, but you are still on your own path, one that is not created for you but by you.
This means you have responsibility for your path and your choices. Scary and liberating. Terrifying and freeing. If you turn right, you’ll see what’s there. If you turn left, the same thing. If you stand still, you’ll get a break but you may watch others pass you by. It’s your choice. No matter what, you will learn if you pay attention. You will always be on your path, and no one is to say whether it’s right or wrong…it just is.
So stop worrying about whether you are on the right path. Yours is right under your feet. Choose where you want it to go. You are free to do so.
Best article I’ve read in a while. Thanks.