Harvesting your days.
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“If you’ve been around indigenous cultures, the way you get a name, the way you get named… First, you can’t name yourself. And second, the people that know anything in that culture, watch how you behave. And they watch how you behave when you think no one is looking. That is the name you get. So it’s very rarely sweetgrass woman. It could be man who was late to collect his children from school on Monday.”
— Martin Shaw
“[Sufi mulla] Nasrudin goes into the bank with a check to cash and he hands the check to the cashier. And the cashier studies the check and the check looks wonderful, but Nasrudin looks like a complete derelict. And the cashier says, “Sir, this check looks fine, but can you identify yourself?” Nasrudin reached into his pocket and pulled out a mirror and he said, “Yup, that’s me.””
— Ram Dass
One of the many things I appreciate about Berlin culture is that people are much less interested in what others do for a living. When I lived in London, it never felt far from the forefront of a conversation and was sometimes the first question a person would ask when meeting me. Here, the question sometimes takes a long time and many conversations to come; often, the question is never asked.
A couple of weeks ago, the question did come from one of the parents at my son’s kita that I’m friendly with. We often see each other in the playground or around the neighbourhood, and have known each other for months. When she eventually asked what I did for work, I winced inwardly, a reflex. I have a well-worn way of describing what I do, and I love my work - but I dislike the question immensely.
This is partly because I find it unnatural to squeeze myself into labelled boxes, however much they might be roles that feel true and important to me. It is also because I am much more than these roles, yet inevitably I will get remembered as ‘the guy who coaches people’ or ‘the man who runs men’s groups’.
And lastly, I felt this reaction because I don’t really know what I’m doing. A few years ago, I gave up on all ideas of a fixed strategy for my work or life, realising this felt inhibiting rather than clarifying, and that in reality I am being swept along by something larger than my ‘plans’. This is still a relatively new way to inhabit life for me, so I perhaps feel defensive in reaction to a question that pulls me back into the linear, orderly way of organising my identity that society so often seems to demand.
Identity formation is a paradoxical endeavour. As infants and children, it is healthy and essential to develop an ego, an outward-facing manifestation of who we are, mediated by various personas. As we grow older, we form and discard personas - the teenager swiftly buries the interests and obsessions that once seemed permanent as an adolescent, and the young adult often does the same with the preoccupations of teenage years.
This process continues further into adulthood, accelerated again when we enter a profession or workplace. There, we are required to form a version of ourselves that is acceptable to the environment, an unconscious conformity in order to fit in and succeed.
Over time, this persona can become our dominant one, something I see a lot in people who spend decades in corporate environments. Somewhere in the first half of our lives, we have successfully built what James Hollis calls the “provisional identity” - precisely the thing that needs to be interrogated, remade or even dismantled if we are to live a truly meaningful and happy second half of our lives.
In my teenage years, I would cycle through different identities, briefly trying them on to see how well they fit. Outward manifestations, like which music I listened to, what clothes I wore, and what my favourite films were, were signals about my emerging identity.
I thought I was choosing, and sometimes I was, but mostly I was either responding to my real preferences or under the influence of those around me: becoming a football obsessive was a real and almost unlikely passion; becoming a fan of indie guitar bands was due to the influence of my friends and a reaction to my brother (who was a raver and house music fan).
Ram Dass often described being born into “somebody training”. As the son of very successful Jewish American parents who expected certain things of him, as did the culture, he cultivated the personas that would facilitate his acceptance by others. He invested great energy into becoming somebody, an outward identity, who could only see other people also as outward identities, as their ‘somebodyness’.
Like most people, I too felt a desperate need to ‘be someone’ when I was younger, and there’s now a deep relief I underappreciate in no longer pursuing that mission. It was an exhausting business.
Being a man was an added layer to that pursuit of identity. And not just any man, but a British Indian man. And not just any British Indian man but a British Punjabi Sikh - the perfect cocktail for a man who is ultimately judged not by who he really is or how he lives, but by what he does, and what he accumulates: wealth, power, status. The more of each, the better the man.
Pride and shame were the underlying cultural norms, inseparable twin forces that had me contorting and self-policing myself into someone I wasn’t meant to be.
When I started working as a management consultant in my 20s, my mum asked me what my job title was for the sole purpose of being able to tell other people. I told her I was a ‘consultant’, and although my description of it made no sense to her whatsoever (understandably), she memorised the word.
Years later, my sister told me that our mum had been chatting to someone in her community who asked what I did for a living. When my mum said I was a consultant, they replied, “Oh, a doctor!” My mum did nothing to disabuse them of this misconception and simply moved the conversation on.
For a thankfully brief number of years, I became or attempted to become the serious corporate guy, viewing all of the world, including social interactions, as domains to be analysed, strategised, competed over and dominated. It was never really me, and fortunately, the energy and suffering involved in maintaining that version of myself became too great to ignore.
At the time, though, it was confusing and painful to acknowledge because it invited a terrifying question: Who am I really? I’m living the answer to that now, and yet the full answer is still revealing itself; in fact, it may never be fully known.
“This is what the French call déformation professionnelle. Seeing life through one’s profession is one of the results of professional training. The scribe is orderly, the bureaucrat indecisive, the tailor sees the stitching not the man. One becomes identified with the role one plays, the persona one wears; outside moves inside and determines outlook.”
— James Hillman
This is one of the unanswered questions that haunts so many citizens of developed, wealthy nations. It is a question we have been taught to ignore, steered away from at such a young age that we forget it exists, and stripped of the tools and rituals that might support our journey towards resolving it.
There is a great and tragic irony that so many of our educated classes are pursuing lives that are not theirs, not anyone’s really. Millions of young people emerge from colleges and universities with the privilege of elite education and then proceed to take roles in a profession that slowly chokes the life out of their souls. All that supposed (yet illusory) freedom and choice, and yet this is how it goes for so many.
In my corporate consulting days, I would often hear people say things like “I’m really passionate about supply chain optimisation” or speak enthusiastically about the “exciting” conference they had just been to on information security standards. Whenever they did, a small voice in my head would say, “Really? That can’t be true?”
Almost simultaneously, another voice would say, “Why aren’t you passionate about something like that? You’ll never get ahead if you don’t find that.” I believed, in part, that I was defective for not having the kind of zeal for work that often felt devoid of any real meaning. Everyone else seemed to have found their vocation, and I was just faking it.
Does anyone really dream of being the countless robotic and arid-sounding professions that modern life offers - not just the job, but the person that goes with it, too?
I am not suggesting that these roles and titles do not offer anything. On the contrary, they offer just enough of several things to keep most people from considering the bigger question of who they really are. Over time, the inquiry seems frivolous and childish.
They can offer mastery too, the opportunity to learn and become expert at something, which can offer a real sense of fulfilment. Looked at closely, though, this is really an attachment of the provisional identity, a sense of pride that inflates the ego.
Mastery alone can only last so long; it is a poor substitute for real meaning and eventually burns out in a way that exacerbates the pain. In the words of Thomas Merton, “People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.”
Now, you might say we can’t have a world where everyone is pursuing their dreams or doing their ideal work. And that might be true. But the question I’d invite you to consider is this: what is the full and real cost of a society so commonly populated with smart, privileged and capable people straining to succeed in work that they don’t truly care about?
What is the aggregate effect of so many of us accepting roles and identities handed to us by our culture and unquestioningly taking them up, spending a lifetime maintaining an identity that is not truly ours?
I propose it is huge; a vast and almost invisible drain on our individual and collective potential. It is a spiritual crisis in the sense that we routinely and thoroughly condition young people to abandon their dreams, their intuitions, their soul calling in favour of succeeding according to an external set of rules we’ve never questioned, with the goal of validation from others and material gain.
Who are you really? That is a question so simple yet so vital that it terrifies most adults. It’s a question they stopped exploring long ago in exchange for the comfort of an off-the-shelf identity. Children don’t need to answer this question; they simply are who they are until they’re told otherwise.
For most of us, midlife invokes this question more starkly, sometimes triggered by an existential life event like severe sickness, divorce or bereavement. The question then becomes unavoidable and even more terrifying, especially as so few of us have the resources and support to navigate such terrain.
To attempt to approach this question requires letting go of almost everything we know. All that painstakingly accumulated knowledge, the intricate edifices of our personalities, roles and job titles, the fetishising of material goods, even the relationships we have grown. All of them must be re-questioned and, sometimes temporarily and carefully, relinquished like fully undressing and walking into a dark forest, naked and alone.
There is a reason so many religious and spiritual rituals involve strict fasting and other forms of abstinence: we must remove as many of our identity attachments as possible if we are to stand a chance of encountering God.
And by God, I mean our real selves, our souls, or whatever we want to call it that represents us in our pure, true, unadorned and most beautiful form; the person you were before the identity and the job title took over, the person hoping to be discovered again, the person you are waiting to become. Don’t leave it too late.
“What are you harvesting in the hours of the day in which you’re dedicating yourself? Because it’s not a passive process to work. You’re shaping an identity. It’s like practicing… Imagine if you practiced a musical instrument for eight, nine, ten, or eleven hours a day. Wouldn’t matter if you had any musical proclivity at all. You would become incredibly good at the clarinet, at the piano, at the saxophone. So you’re becoming incredibly good at whoever you’re practicing at being in the hours of the day. So Harvest asks you to say, by the way I am in my everyday, who am I practicing at becoming? Do I actually want to become that person?”
— David Whyte
About me.
I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.
Contact me to:
Make sense of what’s going on with you, your work and your life through my coaching practice.*
Make sense of what’s going on in your organisation through group work, workshops and strategy sessions.
Have a real conversation.
At the heart of my work is helping individuals and organisations to figure out what is really going on.
You can also find out more about my work with men & masculinity here.
*I’m taking on one new coaching client. I work with people who are looking to make sense of themselves, their lives and their work, and make extraordinary changes. If that’s you, get in touch, I’d love to chat.
[main image, ‘Untitled’ by Ramon Keimig]