During mid-life I find myself prone to bouts of anxiety, particularly when facing stretches of time alone. Lacking career or educational goals and having little interest in a social life makes it difficult to address the dissatisfaction and loneliness I feel.
I see myself only in relation to others: parent, family member, employee, helpful neighbor or friend. Aspirational and creative work is for other people, not me. Most importantly, I do not understand that personal change starts close-in.
I have a dream
Despairing my situation will ever change, I have the following dream:
A beautiful and spirited horse, head held high, is led into a small, gloomy apartment. The entrance to a narrow tunnel opens from one wall. To leave the confinement of the apartment and pass through the tunnel to its unknown destination, the horse must undergo a dramatic lowering of its head.
I understand the dream to say the way out of my personal confinement starts with radical humbling. Hardly the solution I want, Life steps in with the perfect solution: a new job.
Attracted to the job’s promise of interesting work, I find a far different reality. Not only does it not make use of my abilities, its most outstanding feature is tedious, repetitive and boring clerical work.
I push to find employment more to my liking, but half-dozen inter-company interviews and several job searches fail to produce change. When a promising opportunity for promotion leads nowhere, confusion and discouragement hit hard.
Weighted by financial necessity but armed with the personal meaning of my dream, I am ready to seek mastery of a different kind. I commit to the job I have and recast it as a spiritual practice.
Following my dream
My first goal is to extend unwavering courtesy and patience to all people in all circumstances. Next, develop my ability to perform tedious tasks for longer and longer stretches of uninterrupted time.
As my will strengthens, I ask the perennial question of spiritual seekers everywhere: Who am I? When bored or frustrated, who am I? Absent recognition and status, who am I? Who am I when disappointment visits yet again?
Initially, ‘who I am’ ain’t pretty. Unconscious of feeling entitled, dull work generates anger and resentment. Unaware of the desire to control, authority provokes resistance.
Familiarity with Jung’s teachings on archetypes and complexes helps me bring more consciousness to the affects and moods that seize me. I learn to recognize predictable streams of thought and question the motive or agenda the thoughts carry. I battle their disruptive intent, imagining myself in the heat of a fiery kiln out of which something desirable will come.
To my great satisfaction, something desirable DOES come. Slowly, I acquire mastery of an inner kind, dropping harmful habits I don’t realize I have and developing invisible muscle I don’t realize I need. Anxiety transforms to joy, uncertainty to courage and convention into creativity.
My unmet desire for a life based on the comfort of prescribed roles morphs slowly into an ‘inner odyssey’ of creative adventure.