Joseph Campbell once said that if you can see the path in front of you clearly, then it is not your path.
I am finding it hard to define success for myself. More precisely, I am finding it hard to let go completely of the definitions of success that were handed to me in childhood and in my early adult life. When I am feeling stressed or insecure, it is too easy to abandon whatever I had been working on and to revert to these old patterns. A friend of mine calls these patterns, “The Pihl Story.”
This script can be traced to my grandfather, who came to America when he was roughly my age or a little younger. Fleeing post-war Europe, he wanted to create a life where his family could be safe and get ahead. He farmed by day and drove truck at night, sleeping maybe 3 hours a day for close to a decade. Then he worked at his farm until he was 86, and finally retired. He made sacrifices that very few people have made, and achieved what very few people achieve. Much of his story is admirable.
In turn, his kids started working when they were very young, got jobs in their early teens, and sprinted into the adult working world as soon as they could. Some of them went to college and worked their way through school. Then they worked long hours and spent their twenties and thirties setting themselves up with careers and financial security. When he was my age, my own dad was working something like 50-60 hours a week and building a house by hand in his “free time.” This is the house I grew up in.
Whether this mythology was passed down consciously or not, these are the stories I was raised with. And so, for much of my life, I figured it was my duty to succeed in school, so that I could succeed in college, so that I could go to medical school, so that I could get a great job making lots of money, so that I could fulfill my own segment of The Pihl Story.
This approach ran into a few snags, however. First, I noticed that money didn’t drive me like it seems to have driven my father and grandfather. They broke out of poverty and scarcity so successfully that there was nothing left for me to break out of (economically, at least). Blazing my own frontier would look different, and be measured differently from their financial success. Second, I talked to several doctors (my presumed future occupation), and noticed that none of them were happy. At least, no one I related to. Third, once I started making enough money to cover my expenses, I noticed that the nonfinancial areas of my life had a much larger marginal impact on my happiness than additional financial success did. In what world would it make sense to sacrifice these other areas for the sake of extra money? And so I decided not to become a doctor and to try and find something I might actually enjoy.
But was I free of the narrative yet? No. And I’m still not. There remains this piece of my identity which is still rooted in the family lore. I am a Pihl. This is what Pihls do. To do less would be a disappointment to your family and the spirit of your grandfather. To do less would mean letting this story die. To do less would mean discarding the sacrifices of the previous generations, cashing in and reaping the benefits without paying forward the privileges I’ve inherited (being born in America, in relative affluence, with good role models for professional and financial success). Wouldn’t it be selfish not to follow that playbook?
Rationally, I know it wouldn’t be selfish. Rationally, I know that nothing would make my grandfather happier than seeing his grandkids live the lives of their own dreams. Why would he have made those sacrifices if not to see his family be happy? On top of which, for all this talk of sacrifice, he nevertheless lived his own life in a way that was satisfying to him. He bucked the expectations of his own family, and he found work that he enjoyed (farming, which is not a career known for being particularly lucrative).
Yet the family story is also shot through with fear. Fear of not having enough, fear of losing what you’ve worked for, fear of vulnerability, fear of not being enough. Fear of your kids not having enough, of their not being able to make it in what seems to be a hard, cruel world.
Some of what I feel is a fear of being worried about. There is a desire to demonstrate that I have plenty of money, that I am “a success” to such a degree that my family doesn’t feel like it has to worry about me. It is a “fear of fear.” Which is stupid.
Here is the problem with the well-established path. It is free of mystery. It requires not so much that you grow, take chances, and discover yourself as that you can handle whatever burden of sacrifice necessary to make it through to the end of that path. It is the enemy of exploration, of spontaneity, and of faith. It is the enemy of a rich and rewarding life.
This is the problem that I think a lot of people face. We have some path before us that appears to offer a certain outcome. If the outcome is good, we tend to latch on to that promise, though we do so at considerable cost. Rather than let life unfold day by day, and make choices and adjustments as we go, we want to solve our whole life’s “problem” all at once. We want to know with confidence what we’ll be doing for work every day this year, next year, next decade, all the way through until our retirement. At which point we can start really living. Rather than meander through a garden maze, pausing now and then to smell the flowers and admire a songbird, we (or rather, our egos) would rather sit in stifling traffic on a long, straight highway watching the horizon creep closer inches at a time. We trade the journey for the destination, even though most of us know that life is not only “about” the journey. Journey is what life is!
To be honest, while I think I understand the problem, I don’t exactly know what the solution is. My best guess would be that I need to take things day by day. That I need to develop some combination of faith and humility. Rather than ask, “what do I want?” it would perhaps be better to ask God, “what do you want for me?” Often, when I turn over the reins to my higher power, the result is better than I ever knew to ask for. But this does not stop me from trying to take back control. I forget everything I’ve learned about humility and try to manage my own path. Luckily, things go badly pretty quickly. I get irritable and impatient. I try to force things to go my way, and consequently I lose all enjoyment of life.
Conversely, when I have faith that God wants what is ultimately best for me (even if that may be uncomfortable in the short term), my life works astonishingly well. Beyond my wildest dreams, in fact. I become flexible, coachable, and peaceful. My needs are met, not through my own striving, but by focusing on helping others. Though it is tempting to claim credit for my successes, the reality is that my higher power is doing for me what I could not do for myself. And so long as I remember to surrender, life continues to go well. But again, this is a practice, not a formula.
What seems to be required is letting go.