“The woman who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The woman who walks alone is likely to find herself in places no one has ever been before.” ~ Albert Einstein
That train of thought lasted all of about 60 seconds.
I’ve never been part of the crowd and I never wanted to be. I’ve always pushed boundaries, my own and those of others. I left my last corporate job because the company wanted to do what it’s always done dressed up in a slightly different costume. I realized I needed something different, something more in line with my own philosophy: if we want change, we have to change, and change is the only thing that keeps life exciting. It’s also the only thing we can be certain of.
I packed my bags, headed out toward unbroken ground, and I’ve never looked back. I needed to get to places no one has been before, and so far that’s exactly where I’ve been spending my time. It’s pretty glorious out here under the open sky. There’s more air, more light, and more life.
And as for the pitches that I was afraid were too far out there? They aren’t. They’re going really well. People do get it and want it, so much so that they wonder why it’s never been done before. And that’s just about the greatest piece of encouragement I could ask for at the close of my 3rd week of my freelance life.
“What saves us is to take a step. Then another step.”~ C. S. Lewis
A lot of people take about the day they made a change, a big decision, a new commitment.
But what about the day after? Do they wake up panicked by what they’ve done? Does their conviction grow each day after? Here is how I felt: just fine. Oddly fine.
Sometimes people fear staying too long in a situation that no longer suits them. I believe in my case I stayed just the right amount of time. I got my finances in order, my direction became clear and focused, and then leaping was the next logical step.
There were certainly moments of trepidation and fear. I’m sure there will continue to be these moments. They do pass. I just take another step, and keep going. Today is that second step, the second step on a new path. Of course it will feel rocky and of course I will feel unsure. It is new. It doesn’t know me. And I don’t know it. Yet. But we will grow together.
There is a freedom in not knowing what to do next. We cannot be right nor can we be wrong so we don’t need to worry about the decision. All we can do is clearly see the options, try one avenue, and then try another if need be. Once we can admit this to ourselves, embrace it and be okay with it, a lot of the stress falls away. The suffering of our lives lies in our indecision to act, not in our actions.
We go to yoga classes to find ease. We seek out ways to laugh more, do meaningful work, to blow off steam. We wish every day could be easier for everyone. But anyone who’s been around on this planet long enough has experienced pain in one form or another. Supreme loss, struggle, sadness. Or at the very least we know someone who has and we ask, “Why do terrible things happen to good people?” We question everything in the face of difficulty – our faith, our relationships, our own abilities to generate happiness and abundance.
In my apartment building fire, in my own upbringing, there was a lot of hardship and pain. For many years, I spent a lot of energy being angry and then a lot more energy suppressing that anger in an effort to appear “normal”. The truth is that I needed that suffering, that trauma, to make the most of my time here. The darkness was necessary because it forced me to step into the light.
Last week, The New York Times ran an article entitled “Post-Traumatic Stress’s Surprisingly Positive Flip Side“. Synchronously, Al’s talk at ISHTA last week addressed this idea, too. He commented that we don’t need to let suffering, ours or that of others, discourage us. Suffering leads to transformation. If we were happy with every circumstance, we would have no need to grow. We could just hang out in our current state forever. But what kind of existence is that? This life, on this plane, is about transforming the soul and nothing causes transformation and change as much as discomfort.
In this way, we become grateful for all the crappy things that happen to us and to those we know and love. These circumstances are the Universe’s way of propelling us into becoming the people we are meant to be. That’s a lot to digest and accept. And let’s be clear – it’s really a bummer that we have to suffer to be free, to evolve, to change. I wish there was another way. But the good news is that change is always possible and it’s within our power to bring it into being with our own two hands.
“Imperfect is perfect.” ~ Wendy Newton, Senior Teacher at ISHTA Yoga
I spent most of my younger days striving for perfection. I wanted to be the perfect daughter, girlfriend, friend, student, writer, and athlete. But here’s the rub of trying to be a perfectionist – no matter how close we get to perfect, it’s never good enough. Once that reality sets in, we begin to approach a frightening, slippery slope. We begin to feel that because we can’t do enough then we aren’t enough. And once we go there, we will find it almost impossible to back away from the ledge. We will chase down perfection until we are exhausted, and we’ll never catch her. She isn’t meant to be ours.
The year after I graduated from college, I came across the commencement speech that author Anna Quindlen gave at Mount Holyoke about perfection and why we should abandon its pursuit. Without exaggeration I say that it saved my life. Not in the same way that my instincts saved me during my apartment building fire, but in a more subtle way. Her words hit me like a ton of bricks and those bricks built a wall between me and perfection. They stopped me in my tracks with such a screeching halt that I had no choice but to give up the chase. Her words and experience gave me permission to go in pursuit of my true self, not the perfect self I was trying so hard to be and always failing to become.
The journey to me was long and sometimes lonely. And sometimes it was joyful and fascinating. And sometimes it was frustrating and sad. But I couldn’t give it up. Something deep inside told me I had to keep striving to find out who I was and what I was meant to do in this lifetime. I had to discover what I was meant to contribute to humanity. I’ve revisited Anna Quindlen’s words many times since I first read them 13 years ago. They’ve been a comfort to me along the way. They kept me going when I wasn’t even sure that what I was looking for could be found.
On my first night of teacher training at ISHTA Yoga, Senior Teacher Wendy Newton talked about the essence of ISHTA as a wholly individual practice and I knew I had found the right path forward for this juncture. She closed the lecture by summarizing ISHTA as the realization that imperfect is perfect, exactly the same message that Anna Quindlen delivered all those years ago.
If you happen to be on a quest to find you, I hope Wendy’s and Anna’s words bring you as much peace as they’ve brought to me.
Anna Quindlen’s Commencement speech at Mount Holyoke May 1999
I look at all of you today and I cannot help but see myself twenty-five years ago, at my own Barnard commencement. I sometimes seem, in my mind, to have as much in common with that girl as I do with any stranger I might pass in the doorway of a Starbucks or in the aisle of an airplane. I cannot remember what she wore or how she felt that day. But I can tell you this about her without question: she was perfect.
Let me be very clear what I mean by that. I mean that I got up every day and tried to be perfect in every possible way. If there was a test to be had, I had studied for it; if there was a paper to be written, it was done. I smiled at everyone in the dorm hallways, because it was important to be friendly, and I made fun of them behind their backs because it was important to be witty. And I worked as a residence counselor and sat on housing council. If anyone had ever stopped and asked me why I did those things–well, I’m not sure what I would have said. But I can tell you, today, that I did them to be perfect, in every possible way.
Being perfect was hard work, and the hell of it was, the rules of it changed. So that while I arrived at college in 1970 with a trunk full of perfect pleated kilts and perfect monogrammed sweaters, by Christmas vacation I had another perfect uniform: overalls, turtlenecks, Doc Martens, and the perfect New York City Barnard College affect–part hyperintellectual, part ennui. This was very hard work indeed. I had read neither Sartre nor Sappho, and the closest I ever came to being bored and above it all was falling asleep. Finally, it was harder to become perfect because I realized, at Barnard, that I was not the smartest girl in the world. Eventually being perfect day after day, year after year, became like always carrying a backpack filled with bricks on my back. And oh, how I secretly longed to lay my burden down.
So what I want to say to you today is this: if this sounds, in any way, familiar to you, if you have been trying to be perfect in one way or another, too, then make today, when for a moment there are no more grades to be gotten, classmates to be met, terrain to be scouted, positioning to be arranged–make today the day to put down the backpack. Trying to be perfect may be sort of inevitable for people like us, who are smart and ambitious and interested in the world and in its good opinion. But at one level it’s too hard, and at another, it’s too cheap and easy. Because it really requires you mainly to read the zeitgeist of wherever and whenever you happen to be, and to assume the masks necessary to be the best of whatever the zeitgeist dictates or requires. Those requirements shapeshift, sure, but when you’re clever you can read them and do the imitation required.
But nothing important, or meaningful, or beautiful, or interesting, or great ever came out of imitations. The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.
This is more difficult, because there is no zeitgeist to read, no template to follow, no mask to wear. Set aside what your friends expect, what your parents demand, what your acquaintances require. Set aside the messages this culture sends, through its advertising, its entertainment, its disdain and its disapproval, about how you should behave.
Set aside the old traditional notion of female as nurturer and male as leader; set aside, too, the new traditional notions of female as superwoman and male as oppressor. Begin with that most terrifying of all things, a clean slate. Then look, every day, at the choices you are making, and when you ask yourself why you are making them, find this answer: for me, for me. Because they are who and what I am, and mean to be.
This is the hard work of your life in the world, to make it all up as you go along, to acknowledge the introvert, the clown, the artist, the reserved, the distraught, the goofball, the thinker. You will have to bend all your will not to march to the music that all of those great “theys” out there pipe on their flutes. They want you to go to professional school, to wear khakis, to pierce your navel, to bare your soul. These are the fashionable ways. The music is tinny, if you listen close enough. Look inside. That way lies dancing to the melodies spun out by your own heart. This is a symphony. All the rest are jingles.
This will always be your struggle whether you are twenty-one or fifty-one. I know this from experience. When I quit the New York Times to be a full-time mother, the voices of the world said that I was nuts. When I quit it again to be a full-time novelist, they said I was nuts again. But I am not nuts. I am happy. I am successful on my own terms. Because if your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all. Remember the words of Lily Tomlin: If you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.
Look at your fingers. Hold them in front of your face. Each one is crowned by an abstract design that is completely different than those of anyone in this crowd, in this country, in this world. They are a metaphor for you. Each of you is as different as your fingerprints. Why in the world should you march to any lockstep?
The lockstep is easier, but here is why you cannot march to it. Because nothing great or even good ever came of it. When young writers write to me about following in the footsteps of those of us who string together nouns and verbs for a living, I tell them this: every story has already been told. Once you’ve read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird, and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had. And that is herself, her own personality, her own voice. If she is doing Faulkner imitations, she can stay home. If she is giving readers what she thinks they want instead of what she is, she should stop typing.
But if her books reflect her character, who she really is, then she is giving them a new and wonderful gift. Giving it to herself, too.
And that is true of music and art and teaching and medicine. Someone sent me a T-shirt not long ago that read “Well-Behaved Women Don’t Make History.” They don’t make good lawyers, either, or doctors or businesswomen. Imitations are redundant. Yourself is what is wanted.
You already know this. I just need to remind you. Think back. Think back to first or second grade, when you could still hear the sound of your own voice in your head, when you were too young, too unformed, too fantastic to understand that you were supposed to take on the protective coloration of the expectations of those around you. Think of what the writer Catherine Drinker Bowen once wrote, more than half a century ago: “Many a man who has known himself at ten forgets himself utterly between ten and thirty.” Many a woman, too.
You are not alone in this. We parents have forgotten our way sometimes, too. I say this as the deeply committed, often flawed mother of three. When you were first born, each of you, our great glory was in thinking you absolutely distinct from every baby who had ever been born before. You were a miracle of singularity, and we knew it in every fiber of our being.
But we are only human, and being a parent is a very difficult job, more difficult than any other, because it requires the shaping of other people, which is an act of extraordinary hubris. Over the years we learned to want for you things that you did not want for yourself. We learned to want the lead in the play, the acceptance to our own college, the straight and narrow path that often leads absolutely nowhere. Sometimes we wanted those things because we were convinced it would make life better, or at least easier for you. Sometimes we had a hard time distinguishing between where you ended and we began.
So that another reason that you must give up on being perfect and take hold of being yourself is because sometime, in the distant future, you may want to be parents, too. If you can bring to your children the self that you truly are, as opposed to some amalgam of manners and mannerisms, expectations and fears that you have acquired as a carapace along the way, you will give them, too, a great gift. You will teach them by example not to be terrorized by the narrow and parsimonious expectations of the world, a world that often likes to color within the lines when a spray of paint, a scrawl of crayon, is what is truly wanted.
Remember yourself, from the days when you were younger and rougher and wilder, more scrawl than straight line. Remember all of yourself, the flaws and faults as well as the many strengths. Carl Jung once said, “If people can be educated to see the lowly side of their own natures, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and to love their fellow men better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more tolerance toward oneself can only have good results in respect for our neighbors, for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures.”
Most commencement speeches suggest you take up something or other: the challenge of the future, a vision of the twenty-first century. Instead I’d like you to give up. Give up the backpack. Give up the nonsensical and punishing quest for perfection that dogs too many of us through too much of our lives. It is a quest that causes us to doubt and denigrate ourselves, our true selves, our quirks and foibles and great leaps into the unknown, and that is bad enough.
But this is worse: that someday, sometime, you will be somewhere, maybe on a day like today–a berm overlooking a pond in Vermont, the lip of the Grand Canyon at sunset. Maybe something bad will have happened: you will have lost someone you loved, or failed at something you wanted to succeed at very much.
And sitting there, you will fall into the center of yourself. You will look for that core to sustain you. If you have been perfect all your life, and have managed to meet all the expectations of your family, your friends, your community, your society, chances are excellent that there will be a black hole where your core ought to be.
Don’t take that chance. Begin to say no to the Greek chorus that thinks it knows the parameters of a happy life when all it knows is the homogenization of human experience. Listen to that small voice from inside you, that tells you to go another way. George Eliot wrote, “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” It is never too early, either. And it will make all the difference in the world. Take it from someone who has left the backpack full of bricks far behind. Every day feels light as a feather.
I’m working away on the narratives for The Geronimo Project, my new online writing project that celebrates people who took big leaps in their careers and want to share their stories to inspire others. I’ve been kicking around this writing project for a while and on Leap Day I put out the call into the world. I’m astounded by the interest and the truly inspiring stories that have come my way since. The project will launch formally in late April.
While hunting around for some images on Pinterest to go with the posts, I came across this quote from Steve Jobs, one of my Geronimo heroes (and one of my favorite yogis of all time). He was the king of people who took big career leaps of faith. The quote is pulled from his commencement address at Stanford shortly after his pancreatic cancer diagnosis. It still gives me chills. You may be thinking Steve was super human and that’s why he could afford to live this philosophy. He wasn’t. He was simply and wonderfully a man of conviction. He had guts, and lots of it.
One of my favorite lines is “Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. “ We do this all the time. Too often we settle for living with the consequences of the actions of others rather than the consequences we create. Stop. Just stop. Go live your life, on your terms.
Steve didn’t wait to follow his heart. We shouldn’t either. The clock is ticking.
Whenever we’re working on something big, something bigger than we think we’re capable of doing, we have to make trade-offs. We give up some time, some flexibility, some funds, maybe even some fun activities that we would otherwise do.
In times like this, I find it’s most helpful to think of sacrifice as investment rather than loss. It’s really a transfer of energy. We give up a bit now to work toward achieving something tomorrow that will help us fulfill our purpose. Investment causes us to re-prioritize, and that re-prioritization implies change. Change is never easy, even when it’s welcomed. There is always a period of adjustment.
Be kind to yourself in these times of transition. Understand that what you give up today pales in comparison to the joy and satisfaction of realizing a dream. Recognize that we always have a choice, and in making these investments we are living up to the responsibility of carving our own path.
Let it unfold. Give it the time it needs to show its true and full value. There will be plenty of time for reflecting on and judging the choice. Now, commit to making the most of it and giving it the very best shot at success.
I recently had a small group of people over to my house. As I was drafting up my grocery / to-do list, I wrote down “buy ice.” And then I started laughing. I have a freezer. I have ice cube trays. Did I really need to buy ice? No – I had everything I needed. I just had to take the time to fill the trays with water a few times and then crack the ice into a bowl.
We play this game with ourselves all the time. We put off doing what we really want to do because we need more – more training, more money, more contacts, more experience, more time. We have enough. We are enough. We have everything we need to get going right now. Sure, it’s scary. It’s a risk to let go of the familiar, to go off the well-planned, well-worn path. But that’s all it is – scary. It’s not impossible and we’re not incapable in any way. It’s going to take work but we can make it happen.
So many people have stories of a breaking point – an illness, a loss, a tragedy – that awakened them to the passion of their lives. I certainly do. All of a sudden we realize in a very real, non-negotiable way that our lives are finite, that we only get one time around in this form, and that it’s our obligation and deep responsibility to make the most of it.
Don’t wait for the breaking point. Breathe in and breathe out. The anticipation of leaping is much scarier than the leap itself. So gather up your courage and know that whatever you need to get your dreams to take flight, you already have. “Sometimes you just have to take a leap and build your wings on the way down.” (Kobi Yamada)
Hoffman was photographed at his home in Los Angeles in January by Hedi Slimane.
“And just how long have we got the magic?”~ Dustin Hoffman to his cinematographer regarding the last hour of daylight for filming
Today I’m off to SXSW 2012. I’m excited to be teaching and speaking about the benefits of yoga and meditation for the start-up / tech community. This will be my second year attending as a presenter, and I’m so honored to be a part of the celebration. While many people are sent on behalf of their companies, I’ll be there independently and ready to be inspired by anything and anyone who crosses my path. I feel so much excitement and anticipation of good, good things to come from this experience.
And all the while I’ll be thinking about Dustin Hoffman.
The New York Times featured this mammoth film figure last weekend as he hit the beginner button again. At 74, he is making his directorial debut with Quartet. Termed “a joyful movie about old age”, it explores how four once-famous opera singers have one last opening night by putting together a concert at their retirement home. Is Hoffman scared about starting over, taking this kind of turn in his career at 74?
“I do believe in luck myself,” he says, “but also in fate — it’s a duality. They had been working on ‘The Graduate’ for two years or something. They had a script and were casting, and I was at the end of the list. They had been through the Redfords and all those people. So in a sense, it has all been an accident.”
So if it’s all an accident any way, then what is there to lose? It’s like every win is just gravy and every loss is just another way to learn. And this is a wonderful reminder as I head for Austin and SXSW, a gathering of people who are taking on the role of beginner every day, exploring, experimenting, and with every action trying to make the world a little bit better than it was yesterday. This is the Tao of Hoffman in action – the magic is only going to be around for just so long and it’s our responsibility to make the best of it while we have it.
“In my 61 years of life, I have begun to think that man makes his own stress. When he his stress-free, he goes out and finds some. It is often difficult to live in the moment. There is no stress in being; no tug, no pull, no forward, no back. Floating is so much harder than swimming.” ~ my friend, Adela
Adela is a friend whom I met through another lovely blogging friend, Sharni, and since then she has been an incredibly supportive reader of this blog. A few days ago she posted the comment above on this blog in response to my post on why man’s ability to make himself sick is so confusing to the Dalai Lama. It was pure poetry to me and I had to bring it to everyone’s attention.
What are we so afraid of? Why can’t we let go? Why does gripping at control feel safer than letting life carry us, even though we have so much evidence to the contrary? Why does it take so much confidence and conviction to trust? Why are we so committed to doing rather than be being?
Why? Because we worry that we are not enough. That we aren’t smart enough, kind enough, thoughtful enough, tough enough, ambitious enough, popular enough, attractive enough, successful enough, loved enough. In all our education, we’ve forgotten the most fundamental lesson of all: we, just as we are, right now, in this moment, are magnificent, magical creatures. We are not enough – we are more than enough.
Floating takes practice, but it’s worth it. Trust and reap the rewards.
Christa Avampato 