Life Advice

If you aim to sleep in the devil’s house, be prepared for the bed to be painful.  I said this in relation to someone’s choices not long ago.  I know it to be true because I’ve made some poor choices myself.  I’m certain we all have.  We’ve ignored the fluttering inside us and paid it no additional regard when the light turned yellow.  We’ve blown right past our own voice of warning, pushed through the door and sat ourselves at the head of the table and then wondered why on earth we were being feasted upon.  And in these moments, I think our soul gets weary.  And before long, she’s asking for a kinship hiatus.

I’ve had a knack of sorts in this life for being “successful” in spite of myself.  I feel like it is partially born out of not being as sure as I should be that I am, indeed, OK just the way I am.  Thrust into a world of constructs and structural functionality at an early age, I learned really quickly what the expectations were.  I learned that if I met those expectations, I could be left alone for the most part.  If I got left alone, I had more time to myself and I could do anything I wanted with that time.  I could dream, play, draw, explore, pretend my dog was a lion and we lived in Africa, climb trees, pick wildflowers…  I saved little pockets of time that I purchased by meeting expectations.  I got really fabulous at all of this.  I learned to read people and have a sense of what they wanted.  I was a “good” student.  I mostly used my sense of being able to parse out what was important to teachers and authorities, ability to memorize things and plain logic to get myself high grades, which bought me more freedom.  I never retained more than a fraction of what I supposedly learned.  It would drop away as soon as the grade was received, the next academic year was reached, the degree certificate was signed, date stamped and framed.  As a result, I’ve got a box of report cards with all the right letters on them and several pieces of paper with fancy writing that designate me as a Master of this or that.  My “success” is there in black and white.

 When I look back and realize that people equate all this with “hard work”, I find myself acknowledging that for me, it was wasteful.  It was wasteful because what is hard is to be true to oneself.  What is hard is to now look back at all that has been met and realize that what you have accumulated in skills and knowledge doesn’t mean anything to you.  That what you can do with those skills isn’t anything that you are interested in or even see value in.  What is hard is to think about what might have happened if you had pursued things that you truly loved and how much you would know by now about those things instead of things that mean nothing to your soul, heart and spirit.  What is hard is actually being accomplished at those things that you don’t care for, yet still being told at each and every turn on a daily basis how you should go about them.  What is hard is that you are normally being told how to go about things by a man or two who would undoubtedly fall flat on their face if actually required to go out into the world in which you live within professionally and have to “do something” about this, that or the other. 

The devil, they say, is in the details. We are told things in broad strokes of generality – get good grades, go to college, get a “stable” job and everything will be just fine. But life is not lived “in general”. There is that saying about whether you are living or just alive, and it is a good conversation to keep having with yourself. The answer may change from time to time, but at least you are asking the question. If I were to give life advice to young women, I would say to them to pay close attention to what makes you long for things.  To listen for the music inside you when you pick up a pen, guitar, paint brush or even a microscope.  Notice what makes you catch your breath, whether that be a horse, a sunset, getting lost in the woods or a spreadsheet or in figuring out an equation, writing a story, cooking, or drawing a beautiful picture of what is in your heart.  It doesn’t matter what moves you.  It matters that whatever it is, you follow it.  Follow it despite what everyone else is telling you.  Follow it through the day, night and into the next day, over and over. Follow it over winding pathways, down rabbit holes, climb trees for it and cross oceans if you can. Follow it with everything you have and all the time that there is.  That’s the way to avoid the devil’s house.  That’s the way to keep touch with your own worth.  And that is the only way to truly live.