On the train home, the clouds pink in the autumn late afternoon, the harbour spreading out to the mountains in the distance, which are not yet snow-capped but will be before too long, I think. I’m just coming out of two meetings in a row where people asked me what I wanted to do with my work life. Geeze that’s a good question.
Yesterday I learnt that my IET colleague Elijah died on Saturday. Elijah was an astonishing person—vibrant and wide-eyed and brilliant in very unconventional ways (and probably some conventional ones, too). He and I were hired at the same time, in the same faculty search. They wanted one person, and both Elijah and I interviewed, and they decided they wanted us both and the deans said yes. At that time, we lived several blocks from one another in
When he found out about the colon cancer, he decided to fight it with diet and lifestyle changes instead of with chemo and surgery. He wanted to have a relationship to his cancer and talked in eloquent ways about it and how it had changed him and all he had learnt from it. And in our conversations together, I was often moved to tears at the changes he’d experienced. He talked about how he had once thought of himself as open, but realised that his openness was about an attachment to a particular outcome or way of being. Cancer helped him let go of that attachment. He talked about how he had once loved people but didn’t know how much of that love was attached to particular forms of their behaviour or thinking. Cancer helped him love people exactly the way they were. If he could love the cancer as a part of his own body, he explained, he could love people for who they were. He had the most beautiful reaction to his illness of anyone I’ve ever seen. And, perhaps because of that reaction (rather than the cut-it-out-and-nuke-it relationship most people have with their cancer), he’s dead, less than two years after his diagnosis.
Why am I talking about Elijah on this lovely train ride home at the end of a good day filled with interesting people? Because since Monday when I learnt of his death, I’ve realised that my most powerful tribute and the thing that would make Elijah most pleased was the notion that I carry him with me, that he lives through me and through our other IET colleagues and through the thousands of students whose lives he touched. As I think about what I want from my career in the future, as I think about leadership development and about educational research, I wonder, “Well, why does it have to be that way?” I wonder more actively about which pieces of the system I buy into because I don’t see it, how I can come to have a broader perspective. I wonder about more limitless love and less attachment to a particular perspective or outcome—without the prodding of a terminal illness.
What do I want from this life? I want to play with my kids and have love in my life in a wide variety of arenas. I want to feel like my work makes a difference to others, that I can help the world—in some small way—grow more towards compassion and curiosity and love. I want to think about things that are hard to think about with people I love to think with. I want to wake up in the morning looking at the sea and go to bed at night looking at the stars and walk on the beach in the time in-between. This does not work well as an answer to the question, “Where are you going with your career?” but it’s not that bad an answer to the question, “Where are you going with your life?” And I think Elijah would approve.
ps You can read more about Elijah here.
2 comments:
Perhaps ‘What are you doing’ is not quite the question for you. Doing has goals to achieve some end purpose. Being is a deeper endless purpose from which goals are created. I can see why your colleagues might enquire about your direction. It may seem hard to ‘pin you down’ right now. I see you with a compass, a homing device set to all directions. I see you as a bumble bee whose purpose is cross pollination. At your centre, where you rest, you create a honey, an elixir you share along with your song – your buzz.
It’s good to see that to which we are blind. Easier to see what binds us. What has bound us is not necessarily ‘bad’ – anymore than the egg-shell is bad for the chick. It has been a protective growth environment. So we grow and feel it cramping. We feel it and see it. In seeing it we become liberated. Our sight becomes the torch in the dark. We see the anatomy, the boundaries and conditions of our surround... perhaps of our own making. Once we know why some structures exist and what purposes it ultimately serves, then we are freer to find degrees of freedom within it without getting roasted (or boiled). We don’t waste time and dash our hopes against invisible walls. We are in the world not of the world. We see its boundaries and can cross them with intention and without fear. We understand the game. The thoughts that are hard to think are merely narrow passages to a wider world of freedom. The thoughts sever the chains and lift the blindfold.
Dare to right the book without footnotes. The book that comes from the head and heart to reach the world’s pain. Dare to be non-academic and shockingly commercial so that knowledge reserved for the lecture-theatre and board-room becomes wisdom shared. Let your wisdom reach out and feed souls crying and confused in the darkened wilderness – the mother, the man whose mid-life crisis is transformed into an initiation of hope. Be their guide and succour. You may have to die to, let go of, lose some of the ‘academic’ credibility that …binds you (?), but you may make a difference to humanity through your newborn. Your perspective is broad enough to feed many. Maybe what you are looking at is too small.
Limitless love for others comes from loving our own limitations. They make you real; and when loved they will reveal their treasures to you. Might your Powerful and Benevolent Queen be suffering from a small and mistaken identity? Might she be cooking up more than cookies to nourish the world?
Attachment in itself is without sin. It is said that attachment leads to suffering; that letting go is hard. Can we re-vision a love, an attachment, which includes the beauty and release of letting go, of birthing? And the career…. becomes an expression of life honoured.
With inspiration from Elijah,
Patsy
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