There’s a Rosella in the plum tree, all greens and reds, melodic and wild, stepping from plum to plum. One bite for each and on it goes, and on it goes, until with a screech and a flutter it’s gone again.
We laugh and wonder what its plan was, where it came from and why, and then, for a moment, I envy that bird. Unlike us humans it seemed to know where it was going.
Animals in the world around us, without language, without thinking to get in the way, do what is needed without effort. They move, they stay, they eat, they sleep, all when the body, the environment, the season calls for such things. They don’t need a purpose or a reason, like us, they just follow the moment’s call.
When I sit with humans and we talk about what to do with this experience called life, the conversations are very different.
When people come into counselling for the first time, they are mostly working hard towards two specific goals:
1) Feeling Good All The Time:
The culture around us sends clear messages that the aim of a human life is to feel good. This means that so-called ‘bad’ feelings need to be eliminated and replaced with so-called ‘good’ feelings.
And so we create lives oriented around the avoidance of things that make us feel ‘bad’ and avoiding, numbing or hiding from the feelings that we just can’t avoid having.
This means a life of distraction, avoiding hard things, staying small and keeping clear of risks that might lead to heartache.
And if you make a list of all the things worth doing in this human life, like connecting deeply with others, caring about people, lands and creatures, building something that improves our world, then you can see that none of these are free of the risk of pain.
Anything worth doing can lead to you being hurt.
So we try to have relationships without fully connecting, to do work that matters without ever failing and to fight for important causes without ever being criticised or disapproved of.
Or we chase money, security, fame and other externals that society (and our mind) tells us will lead to a life of ease and comfort.
A life just trying to feel good is largely unfulfilling.
2) Shutting Up the Mind:
The second aim we have when we live on autopilot is to placate, satisfy and hopefully shut up the critical voice in our heads that keeps telling us what we should do, complaining about what we end up doing, predicting the future and sifting through the past.
These words inside our heads take on a strange authority as we grow up, until the mental rules laid out by the mind become, for many, the governing framework of their lives.
Much of what this voice says is concerned with avoiding pain, seeking pleasure and either fitting in or being special. And it is entirely selfish.
So that voice has a hard time being in a relational space. It also tends to focus on short term pleasure (or avoidance of pain) instead of longer term, lifelong values. And finally, even if you do everything right, it will yap about what you did wrong anyway!
Is This All My Life Is?
You might be reading those and wondering, Is this is all my life is about? Just avoiding pain and shutting up my mind? (Someone I work with calls this mind chatter The Head Noise, which is a nice name for it I reckon).
Steve Hayes, who co-created a psychology based on something different (it’s called ACT – Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and is worth a look) asked the question in his book Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life that I love…
The question is What do I want to be about? Or What do I want my life to be about?
Strange questions hey? But if you think about your life, imagining you are at the end of it looking back, what words would you like to represent your journey, your efforts, what you stood for? In the same book Hayes asks you to think about what would be on your headstone, if you were able to live in line with your values.
I’m guessing it wouldn’t be:
Here lies …….., they had an easy time of it.
Or:
Here lies…… they tried their best not to do anything hard.
So what would it be? When you are gone to wherever we go next, what would you want to be remembered for?
Hayesd points out that people whose lives stand for something are remembered for what they did (especially when things were hard), not for the feelings they had along the way, the doubts that plagued them, the times when they were stuck in anxiety.
People remember William Barak walking the Yarra with other elders to approach Parliament house in Naam (Melbourne) and resisting, seeking peace and justice for his people. They remember the contributions of people like Barak, like Simon Wonga, like Rosa Parks, not because they had an easy time but because they stood for something, no matter what oppression and hardship was heaped upon them by the empires they were resisting.
It’s worth noting here that Western culture tends to focus on individual heroes because we are mad with individualism, instead of seeing the way people exist harmoniously inside relational systems as a sign of greatness, but that’s a discussion for another post.
The point, right now, is to consider how you want to show up in the world in places and with people you care about.
Do you want to bring determination, gentleness, care, joy, kindness? What qualities do you want to embody on your life journey?
And finally, once you have some values to live by, take some time to wonder how you would live your life if the energy you put into avoiding pain and seeking to shut up your mind went into living in alignment with those values instead.
What kind of life would you lead, if values, vitality and connection were your guiding lights?
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