We travel life’s highways without giving much thought to the life-orienting goals that determine our direction and motivate our choices. After all, who really thinks through this stuff? Because that’s what people do, we go to school, graduate, enter the marketplace and/or manage the home front. We step up, act responsibly and learn from our experience.
But there’s more. Life’s subjective questions intrigue us. We’re asking: Who am I? What do I really want to get accomplished? Is there more depth to my individual sensitivity, aesthetic sensibility and intelligence than I have explored? Do the conditions and circumstances in which I dwell separate me from my own authentic nature? Is it an unbridgeable divide?
Should conventional absolutes that try to resolve the complexity of life into authoritative but simplistic rules be the source of my marching orders? Or will my life be a better fit for me if they’re derived of careful, deliberative reflection and planning? Really, should I expect to gain anything without planning for it?
Before we get the hang of careful planning, we may have concluded that such effort saps one’s energy and is best left to the dull. But we’re enlivened and inspired when we actually sit still (see my 07.21.14 post titled, Teach us to sit still) and uncover the conceits, false witness and dehumanizing protocols that burden the uncurious life. In fact, with a little practice, we human animals love and feel at ease with our explored consciousness and an eye alert to our blind spots! So, we’re taking stock, here, now. With the future arriving daily.
Indeed, such is our autonomy and life that our transformative fate, always vulnerable to the vagaries of fortune, critically hangs on the quality of our sustained planning. How will we liberate our thinking or, said another way, achieve our own truth and reveal our singular responsibility for our own fate? How can we coordinate in word and deed all that we know ourselves (illusions aside) capable of? What means will help us to focus on the nerve, the determination and the outside-the-box thinking it takes to explore the vast range and flexibility of our unique promise?
In short, we live in a practical world, competing for resources, recognition and prosperity. This undeniable fact of life requires daily attention. But we also bring to our experience a no-less-important subjective life. It, too, is made of cells, generated exclusively by our bodies and subject to the causal chains of nature.
It is to the thoughtful and outspoken presence—the subjective voice of this living system—that we look for the fulfillment, satisfaction and equanimity we hope to find for ourselves. Indeed, a cultivated subjectivity, motivating and shaping crucial life-orienting goals, gives meaning and balance to our lives, poetry to our hearts and character to our souls.
So go our plans, so go our lives.
Arnold Siegel is the founder of Autonomy and Life and the leader of its Retreat Workshops and Advanced Classes.