Letting The Days Go By

I had a meeting with my boss a couple of weeks ago.  It was one of THOSE meetings.  It was the meeting you never want to happen because you have to listen to them tell you all about your shortcomings.  You have to listen to how you have disappointed those around you.  You have to hear about your mistakes and how they affect the entire chain of command.  Now that you feel like a total loser, after all of that, you have to explain yourself.  You have to defend yourself.  You have to come up with reasons why you won’t continue to be seemingly incompetent and then, like an abusive spouse, convince them things will somehow be different from now on. 

You know that all of this is exactly what is going to happen once you make it behind closed doors.  You are a lamb being led to the slaughter and short of some type of timely natural disaster, or a socially unacceptable display on your part (running screaming with scissors towards the fire exit comes to mind) there is nothing you can do.  The tether is tied, the adrenalin is pumping, and you WILL be humiliated.  It is inevitable.  It’s going to be one of those meetings that other people have with their bosses, but not you.  You do your job the right way.  You show up on time.  You put yourself into your work.  Your effort shows.  You are a model employee. 

Well, I’m not a model employee. 

I’ll put it all out on the table for you.  Simply put, I hate my job.  I work in finance.  “Wall Street”, if you will.  It’s an industry that has typically fed off of the vulnerability of regular Joe’s, and has been seen as responsible for the economic downfall of our country. Even though the company I work for is pretty honest and humble, I still feel there is something a bit odd about a business whose main goal is simply making money.  We don’t make any type of tangible product like Coke makes soda or Nike makes sneakers.  We just make money.

I’ve always viewed money as a necessary evil.  It’s a means to an end, but it has never been THE end for me.  It’s never been my main motivational factor.  Therefore, I feel little to no motivation to go above and beyond.  When I take on a project and actually do it well, I feel no sense of accomplishment because I don’t care about what I’m doing.  What I do serves little purpose in the world.  I am a drone. 

Don’t get me wrong, I like most of the people I work with, and what I do isn’t particularly difficult most of the time.  My hours are great, the benefits are stellar, and most of the time my boss leaves me alone and just lets me do my thing.  I also get paid pretty well.  Most people would feel lucky to have the gig I have here, and that makes me feel like a total ingrate.  The truth is that I’m completely spoiled and I’m not even going to pretend that I should be let off the hook for any of this.  If I had an employee who felt about their job the way that I do, I would fire them.   

So what’s my beef?

I am trapped in a David Byrne song.  The last time I checked I was a professional dancer traveling with various musical theater productions.  I danced and sang for a living all over the world.  People PAID me to be on stage.  I played the guitar.  I wrote songs.  I had creative outlet.  I was living my childhood dream!

Then I blinked. 

When I opened my eyes I found myself 40 years old and 25 pounds overweight from sitting behind a desk for 9 hours a day, year after year.  I had been mesmerized by the glow of my computer screen and the clickety-clack of my key-board. 

“Same as it ever was.  Same as it ever was.  Same as it ever was.”

I’ve told myself day after day that I will do something to change my path but, the further and further I get away from the turn I took so long ago, it is less and less visible.  I am afraid I don’t know how to get back.  There is no “Google Maps” for journeys like these. 

“You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?”

I have a regular paycheck, health insurance, and a 401K, but I must have visited some notorious figure down at the cross roads somewhere along the way, because I have a receipt for the final sale of one mortal soul in my pocket. 

“You may ask yourself, my God, what have I done?”

I’m convinced he wrote these lyrics about me. 

I know all of this sounds overly dramatic but I’m not going to apologize.  I’m going to get up on a soap box with a megaphone and say it loudly because in reality I know there are hundreds if not thousands of people out there exactly like me.  I refuse to believe I am alone in this.  There are people out there who had plans that they just never got around to.  They meant to do “something” with their lives and then woke up to find themselves in worlds more mediocre than they’d ever imagined.    Their lives are nothing like they’d hoped for, and they are miserable. 

I don’t want to be miserable anymore, so the obvious question at this point is how do we change it?  How do we begin to be proactive enough to make it different?  Which way do we turn?  How do we take something so complicated as a life that we don’t like and change it into something that we do like?  How do we make it into something that excites us, something that we feel serves a purpose?

I recently attended a meditation workshop led by Sharon Salzberg at the Tibet House in New York City.  She said something that night that resonated with me pretty deeply.  She spoke of a meditation practice in terms of beginning, moving away from your intended purpose, realizing you’ve strayed, and then beginning again.  She said that the moment we realize we’ve strayed is the precious moment.  That is the moment where we can chose to practice compassion with ourselves, and instead of beating ourselves up for merely allowing our mind to wander, we can chose to simply begin again.  That is the practice. 

Okay.  I know this is important information, but how does this help me in real life? 

It took me a few nights to get this, but tonight I realized that maybe if I can forgive myself for becoming distracted from my meditation practice and simply “begin again” as she put it, then maybe I can let this translate into the rest of my life.  Maybe I can forgive myself for becoming distracted from my creative life, and I can simply chose to “begin again” with compassion and without judgment.  It’s the same concept, just on a much larger scale.  How easy is that?  Hmmm…  

Sharon also told a story about Michelangelo.  When asked how he would go about making a statue of an elephant, he said he would take a block of marble and carve away everything that is NOT the elephant.  That sounds just as easy as “begin again”, but if every day is truly the first day of the rest of my life, if every day is indeed ripe with that opportunity, then today I have the opportunity to look at my life like Michelangelo’s block of marble. 

So here I am.  This is my new chosen starting point.  I have a big shiny block of untouched vein filled marble and this is my declaration.  I am beginning again.  I will figure out how to get rid of all the stuff on my proverbial block that is NOT the life I want. 

“You may ask yourself, where does that highway lead to?”

I don't know.  But it's time to start paving the way.  It's time to
"begin again”.