My precious struggle.

It was time we had "the talk."

Photo by Nick Page on Unsplash

I’ve been struggling all week with what to write.

It’s not for a lack of inspiration: it does come to me. I feel the words move me, but as soon as I grasp for them, they vaporize. There’s a lesson in this, to be sure. The closer I pay attention, the more I see how much I hold onto the things that give me a sense of security. If only I could hold the words – I say - then I can keep my promise to myself to keep walking this path toward purpose. I would be fulfilling a commitment. It's a harsh reminder of how much my doing is tied to my sense of worth. In a world that measures us this way, it’s hard not to be carried away by the current.

I press on. I fight with the words that do not want to land.

“Here!” I wave at them, frantically. Can’t they see me? I assume the physical gestures of an aircraft marshaller (that’s what those guys are, ‘marshallers’), dressed in bright orange, as I point toward the passing-by words.

“You are not our destination, we are going elsewhere,” they reply, callously.

If they won’t come on their own, I shall force them. I swipe at them, lose my balance, and fall back, out of breath. It’s not working. It requires too much effort.

What is present in this moment is the sensation of struggle. Struggle requires effort, it’s uses energy, and it assumes that there is some constraint, something against which I must chafe. I am good at struggle. I make myself tight and narrow and then I resist the thick rope I imagine is holding me down. I wriggle until I am sore. After so many years of practice resisting flow, I have mastered this game. Pain is my friend.

I’m defined by struggle; it’s part of my rebel persona, a story that forms the scaffolding of my worldview. The struggle I sense in my body feels old, way older than my decades here.  Not only is it a significant component of how I see myself, I am also a member of a collective that dearly holds onto it. My history, my people’s history, is tied to struggle. With some nostalgia, I find myself taking pride in it. After all, it is evidence of my strength and stamina, this ability to overcome hardship, to be a survivor.  

No, it is not. It is a delusion. There is another name for it, and that is suffering. Plain and simple.

Struggle may have been a strategy to overcome some past hardship, but it’s no longer of service. Most of the time, I find that I glorify my struggle because the alternative would be to admit to voluntary suffering, and that feels shameful. I have plenty of shame to go around already.

I’m coming to realize that my so-called identity is a mirage. I am not caught in a life and death struggle, thank goodness. That would be real hardship. I am challenged by my life circumstances — as are we all. I guess even a life and death struggle would constitute a life circumstance. My brand of struggle is a thought I have about myself, something that gives me a sense of security in a world that’s unpredictable. It feels unique, though it’s far from it. I just like to think of it as my precious struggle.

Perversely, struggle gives me a feeling of control. It’s familiar. The exhaustion of struggle is reliable. The soreness of struggle is reliable. There’s a dependability to the whole enterprise. If I step away from it, even momentarily, I can acknowledge how struggle allows me to feel safe. Struggle also draws me to situations where I can continue to experience it over and over again.

But it’s a new day, and I’m making new moves. I want to break up with struggle. Respectfully, carefully, not an outright rejection so that it hounds me to no end, more of an “it’s not you, it’s me” kind of thing. I’d break the news gently. We’d have a heart to heart.

“Listen...we need to talk. I know we’ve been together forever, and you’ve been the absolute BEST. You were with me every step of the way. We worked hard! By day we slayed! At night we were up, talking until dawn – you, me, me, you in eternal conversation – not a wink of sleep in sight. When sleep finally came, we kept working: in partnership we wore down this jaw, this neck, this back. Damn, we were STRONG.

Remember those amazing grades we got in school? How we got our family to love us? How we wore the right clothes and said the right things so people would like us? And then we got that job, and then the promotion, and the other promotion. We quit the job and set up a business together, holy cow, can you imagine?  Look at this life we built together, oh my goodness – look at how far we have come.  What a TEAM!

But the time has come for us to take a breath.

Don’t freak out, I didn’t say break, I said breath. Literally, BREATHE. It’s all good.

You can stay…you don’t need to move out or anything (unless you want to, of course). I’m just taking a step back from the partnership. You can keep all the shares, I have no need to be an investor in this venture. I want to be as generous with you as you have been with me. Let’s just say I’m ready to take a back seat, play more of an observer role. I’ll never forget you…thank you for your service.”

And that would be that.

Over the years, I have worked so incredibly hard to “find my purpose,” which I am discovering is a fool’s errand. It is the exact opposite of what a purpose needs to land. The preceding sentence is another fallacy. What I am experiencing in real-time is that purpose doesn’t need to “land” because my purpose is already in my being. The fact that I exist, my mere presence, is my purpose personified. What’s preventing the expression of my purpose is all the activity I generate in a fruitless attempt to demonstrate my worth. To prove what? To whom?

Modern society has conflated purpose with vocation. This is a mistake. When we conflate being with doing, we obstruct the natural order of things. We stand in the way of our emergence, of our creativity – whether that creativity is raising a child, inventing a cure for cancer, writing a novel, or building a business.

What purpose needs to blossom is a lot less doing and a whole lot of being. When I was “trying” to write, I couldn’t get the words “right,” so what did I do? I started flailing. I jumped from idea to idea, from this to that and that to this. Which is a perfect example of what I do in life, I try and try and try when things “don’t go my way,” when I simply lack the patience to sit tight. Persistence is so overrated, and so wretchedly depleting. Patience, on the other hand, is massively underrated.

I am ready to break up with struggle. I am ready to commit to my being, my inalienable right to exist, from which my doing shall emerge. I am ready to listen for the sound of infinite possibility so that when it knocks on my door, I can answer.

Just be, I tell myself. Just be.

I am already on my way. We are all already on our way. Suffering is optional.