A couple weeks ago I went to a local Jungian seminar. The topic was the archetype of the path. For the first exercise, we had to select a picture from a stack–like selecting a card–and talk about it.
I pulled the only B&W photo. It was a foot path through woods, just a dirt path. The path turned toward the right in the distance, through a clearing. As I studied it, I realized that a concrete motorway had been constructed perpendicular to the path. The motorway was barely visible through the trees, but it could be seen where it crossed the foot path. The motorway had high concrete sides so that the cars would not go sailing into the trees 30 feet below.
I realized that what I was looking at was my life. When I went into computer support, I did it specifically to make money. I saw it as security. So I stopped thinking about the things I loved and concentrated on doing things to “get ahead.” I set goals and achieved them–get into the field, become a server support person. From there, Directory Services support. Along the way, I got interested in antivirus and virus incident response, largely because it was not considered interesting to most of my coworkers. So I did the things that other people didn’t want to do: antivirus, application delivery via ZENworks, antispam. Because of my interest in virus incident response, I fell into regular incident response. I focused on attaining other certifications, largely because I saw them as ways to advance to…what?
Technical certificates are strange things. They are treadmills–you get one, then the technology goes out of fashion. Sort of like hemlines and handbags for geeks. The other thing is that the higher you go, the more over-qualified and over-specialized you appear to become. Eventually, you reach the top of the mountain.
I am good at what I do, but I can be good at anything I want to do. It’s a useful skill, to be multi-capable. It’s also a curse–people get used to seeing you in a role and you get pigeon holed–and you can’t easily break preconceptions. (Gets worse as you age, too.)
The analogy is the concrete motorway; built by plan and design, heavily supported, artificial, and only going from point A to point B with no deviations. Below is the natural path, maybe running at cross-purposes. Neither is “better,” really. Both are acceptable. You can move from one to the other, but it will not be easy.
How to align my life with my heart? I needed to get off the motorway and get grounded on the earth. I needed something less difficult to maintain that would let me choose another direction if I needed or wanted.
To be fair, I’ve been thinking about this a lot the last few years. I realized in 2005 I needed to make a change and went back to school to study technical writing. I enjoyed the editing more than the writing–the writing was too much like deja vu from my years as a graphic designer. (I did recognize that I write very iNtuitively and that technical writing is a Sensing sport. It’s added some versatility to my style.) Awareness piled onto awareness and I started understanding that, under my adherence to logic and security, my soul was dying. Attempts to honor my core values were not working well–I lacked something, some skill, some facility, to dig deep enough to understand why I was unhappy.
I haven’t figured it out, by the way. I’m understanding myself better, seeing where I am and who I am with clearer vision than I’ve had for a long time.
To wrap up, I’ll leave this with a link to a story called “Why Career Planning is Time Wasted.” It has a beautiful quote:
It’s actually saying that it’s not caution that’s increasing with age, but implicit self-knowledge. People begin to understand that the future holds vanishingly few certainties….
Walk gently.
3 Responses to “The path”
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Perhaps you can expand on writing Intuitively vs. writing as a Sensor. I would think that elaborating technical details would be enhanced by a mix of enumerated measurements and stats etc. along with easy to understand instructions geared towards “benefits” vs. “features” etc. Why would Sensor writing (stats) be favored over the other ?
I’ve often found that “getting off the paved path” can be rewarding or fun. So much so that I sometimes assume that this goes without saying, but obviously not, if one looks around at the way the “first world” is organized for us “proletarians” or “bourgeoise”.
Of course the people at the top are always going off on these Hawaii conferences and so forth, or ensconced in their private corner offices with the nice view etc., often leisurely reading up on the latest management trends about the “process” of knowledge management etc. Meanwhile the people who work for them may resemble those in the movie “Metropolis”.
I think the writing style question deserves its own post, don’t you?
As for the people in the nice offices…I have no clue.
You know it could be that all this talk of core values and such is also a standard. Something created by a guy to explain something about himself. I don’t think that everyone has such a core necessarily. In fact I think that almost without exception that materials which claim that everyone MUST have this kind of thing to be happy or developed etc should be altered to MOST people have something LIKE this.
I’m not saying your wrong to look or that you don’t have such things but I personally have found that some of these things caused me to be unhappy purely by me looking, scouring myself for what wasn’t there. It almost destroyed my relationship with Lori last year trying to find that driving passion which overode my logic. I don’t have that (well not in anything but spikes which are very brief) but this does not have to mean anything about the relationship.
I find that in more cases than just logic my father’s words of “A implies B does not imply that B implies A” have guided me to moderate the extreme of assumption and prejudging.
Go find what makes you happy. Just don’t necessarily expect anyone to be able to point you towards it or tell you how it feels. I reckon that emotions are individualistic as finger prints and that all this stuff with guides on how to make you happy should be treated like philosophy books. They represent one path. One opinion. Someone else’s opinion. Read it, think about it then comes up with your own book.
Observe, reflect, transform.
(A passage which has set me thinking over the weekend.)