Losing sight of the path.
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A dusty traveller wanders into the town square. His clothing is simple, his cheeks sunburnt and glowing.
As he sits on a wall to rest his aching legs, one of the townspeople happens across him. “Are you lost?” he asks the traveller.
“No,” he replies evenly. His eyes shine amber with secrets.
The man looks affronted. “Well, can I help you?” he says, folding his arms.
“I don’t know”, the traveller says thoughtfully, scratching his beard. And then: “Do you have any maps?”
“Oh yes!” replies the man. “We have many maps! Maps of all the town and the surrounding area. Maps of the whole country - even the whole world if that’s what you’re after! Where are you trying to get to?”
The traveller rises slowly, shouldering his pack and lifting his staff. He gazes towards the hills beyond the town. “Perhaps you can’t help me,” he says.
He wanders away from the puzzled townsman, his feet falling into a gentle rhythm.
***
After I left school, armed with some decent exam grades, a little knowledge and very little wisdom, I went to university. A few years later, I had an undergraduate degree, masters degree, a lot more knowledge, not much more wisdom and some wild stories. Firmly on the path.
I joined a graduate scheme at what was then the world’s largest company, an American corporation. I hated it. Three years later, I left and joined a global consulting firm, which, at first, I loved. Still on the path.
By the time I reached the end of my 20s, I knew with a shaking and inconvenient certainty that I didn’t want to continue climbing the corporate consulting ladder.
So, after much work with a coach, I quit and joined a small consulting firm. It was mainly to earn a bit more money while I figured out my next move. This felt like a veer away from the path, but only temporarily.
Three years later, after a surprising amount of fun and growth at this small firm, I took a sabbatical and on a whim, took off on a cycling adventure in the US.
When I got back, I half-finished an awful novel I was working on and graduated from a prestigious writing course. I then quit my job with nothing else lined up, a mortgage to pay and not much money in the bank. Almost by chance, I became an independent consultant.
Stick with me, this gets interesting in a bit.
I’d developed an idea that I wanted to launch a business, perhaps become wildly rich and free by doing so. On to a new path that was actually an old one.
Over the next few years, I also co-founded a startup (2 years of learning a lot, and eventually failing) and was hired to work for a well-funded tech startup. There, whilst renegotiating my contract to include more equity in the company, I had the epiphany that my ‘fuck you’ money was not much money at all - simply enough to pay off my mortgage and have a little left over.
Which provoked the question in me: “What would I do then?”.
I quit the startup and took on another consulting contract. This was in autumn 2019, and at the end of that year, whilst on a mediation retreat, I received a lightning bolt answer to my question: the thing I cared about most was making sense of things, and I wanted to do more of that with other people.
A few weeks later, in early 2020, I signed up for a six-month programme to train as a coach. And a few weeks after that, while I was about to extend my contract, the Covid pandemic hit.
My consulting contract came to an abrupt end not long after. Recession was looming and no-one was hiring. It’s one of the best things that ever happened to me.
I trained and launched my coaching practice and began to follow this new path in the traditional way - network, build a pipeline, take on coaching clients. Dry, dry, dry.
Pretty soon I realised I found this new-old path soul-destroying and dull. I wanted to ‘coach’ and help people make sense of the world, but ‘sales under the guise of conversation’ was not my thing.
That was almost five years ago. Since that realisation (and I’ll stop with the details now) I’ve veered further and further away from anything that looks like a ‘path’.
Not deliberately, but gradually and because I had an unmistakable sense that any path already trodden soon felt constricting and bland.
The journey so far that I’ve shared above might sound like it one of courage and daring - it was not at all. It was plagued by doubt, anxiety, stress and times, the sheer terror of feeling like I was navigating alone and without a map.
What I did have was some inner compass, weak at first, nudging me this way and that according to a magnetic and magical field.
What it is now, as some spiritual teachers might call it, is a pathless path. A high wire act of faith, intuition and paying attention to what emerges. There’s no GPS or satnav here, I’m more like the guy in the outback sniffing animal dung and noticing which way the wind is blowing.
Paths, even spiritual paths, are often traps. Unless by sheer, unbelievable coincidence we choose a path that happens to be exactly the one we should be on, we’re often following someone else’s template, the way that has already been trodden many times before.
Even when I thought I’d left paths, I was merely transferring to new ones. Being at a crossroads or forks in the road presents a series of choices, but the choice we rarely consider is going off-road altogether, abandoning the routes and maps and plunging into the tall grass.
From the moment we’re born, we’re told - by our culture, by our teachers, by mum - that the clear bright path with its golden cobbles is safe and straight. This is the place to be and as long as you don’t fuck up, you’ll make it to the end.
The ‘end’, of course, is not really talked about - but many of us secretly dream of plump early retirement, a view from the porch, abundant health, milk and honey served by our grandchildren, perhaps in our holiday home in the Med.
The shiny path looks like the place to be, it looks like it covers most of the universe. But many of us notice that on all sides of the path, in between our path and others, are these vast abundant wildernesses, uncharted territories in which, every now and then, we glimpse treasure, castles and beasts.
Out there looks ragged and untamed though. So we stay on the path. And whenever we glance sideways towards the dark woods, voices on the road whisper everywhere “Danger, danger, keep away from there”.
Yet still we glance every now and then, terror and longing felt in unison. Underneath that canopy, in the mucky, entangled understory, is life. Messy, awe-inspiring real life. The real life for which some danger and risk is essential.
***
Safety might be good for the ego, but it is fatal for our larger souls. We can live vigorously with some jeopardy or die a slow death from safety.
But to truly become the person you are, not the one the world is telling you to be, can be a lonely and painful endeavour.
And yet, and yet: a journey undertaken in earnest, whether begun in grief, fury or joy, will attract what you need. Accomplices and allies just when you need them and often from the unlikeliest of places. Foes and trials too, of exactly the right flavour, will present themselves as dragons to be slain on the edge of a cliff.
Just before you’re ready to be taught Yoda will appear at your door. When you’re ready to create magic, you’ll stumble into a witches den. You will find the others or they will find you.
And sometimes, when you need to be slapped in the face and shoved off the path that isn’t yours, an expensive door will slam behind you as your painstakingly constructed life ejects you from your shallow Eden.
Don’t be afraid. Or be afraid. Whichever gives you the sustenance to enter the forest, or the jungle, or the outback, and hack your own path through.
Before you know it, you’ll be whistling to yourself as you lop the head off an ogre and vault across canyons.
And every now and then, when you wander into some civilised place you used to know, people will look at you askance. They will whiff the pungent and exotic soil you’ve been treading and feel the terror and longing you once felt.
They will want you to be who you once were, but you won’t be able to oblige. You’ll be too wild and free by then.
"Where we're going, we don't need roads."
- Doc Brown
Tipping Point: navigating collapse and crisis.
“Without beating about the bush, religious traditions often do, with all their failings, make a part of our regular lives things that otherwise we might forget and put out of mind. So little habits of giving thanks for things, for praying for things, for singing together, worshiping together - these things bring into our minds again an awareness of something both beautiful and good that is much bigger than all the forces we see around us that are pushing us to buy or to become part of a group and that is so destructive.”
Some beautiful reflections from Iain McGilchrist on ‘Finding meaning in a world gone mad.’ (15 mins)
About me.
I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.
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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.
'A high wire act of faith, intuition and paying attention to what emerges' - this resonates.