Professor Robert Reich, a professor at 2 of my alma maters (previously at Brandeis Heller School, now at UC Berkeley), takes advantage of the final Wealth & Poverty class of the semester to help graduating undergraduate students frame an understanding of what their futures may hold, and the resiliency tools necessary to navigate life. Take a gander here:
Reich's UC Berkeley Wealth and Poverty Final Class of Semester May 2016
Creating Your Life
The 'career spiral' replaces the 'career ladder.' The skills set required to navigate the world becomes wide and deep, and complexly varied. Since I'm what could probably be considered 'mid-career,' I think I can testify to this. Of course, I leapt wildly forth from Berkeley a couple of decades ago, determined not to get boxed in, to create my own path, to envision a world and work I wanted to manifest in the world, and work towards that--iteratively and responsively, intuitively, creatively, yet guided by some fundamental principles and values for the dignity of life (all life) and the potential harmony and beauty of which we are all a part. And so far, that is how I've carved out my path, with some mis-steps and re-takes along the way, all of which provided invaluable lessons for me. Mine was an unconventional path at the time-- and beautifully, in my opinion, this kind of undefined trajectory is becoming more common. The potential of what we create together opens up so much more inclusively, thoughtfully, and varyingly, when we must remain engaged in our paths -- we cannot sleepwalk through the decades of our lives!
"The obstacle is the path"
Another very important message Reich gives in his lecture is, "You will fail." Let me say that again, "you will fail."
When I was a child with extremely perfectionist tendencies, I thought my mother was being a terrible person when she told me I had to learn to fail. My childlike, 'why would you want me to FAIL???' evolved into gratitude for my mother, who taught me to allow life to get messy sometimes, to roll with the punches, to pick myself up and dust myself off. Worst case scenarios for kids growing up in difficult circumstances, and their possibilities, were faced head on. The events and developments I thought at the time would be absolute end-games (for others, for myself), my mother taught me were just bumps on the road. If you could do something about it, if you could dust yourself off and continue on, one way or another, nothing was so terrible in life that one couldn't cope.
Winning Trophies
I also like that Reich places "Success" in quotes-- I've never been comfortable with the language of 'success,' or in the end, 'success and failure.' Life is not a scale of wins and losses, that in the end will culminate in our value as human beings. Life is experiential. Life is engagement. Life is relationships. Life is the meaning we create--and more interesting when we create it collaboratively, together.
Nobody 'wins' at life. There is not a gold medal awaiting you at your death bed. What do you do with a gold medal anyway? Something else I've never understood, something else from which I've been unable to derive meaning. Trophies come in many forms. You win! You have a yacht! You win! You bought out all the products in Whole Foods and pushed everyone else out of the way in doing so! You win! Someone out in the world has placed a mark upon your forehead- you are worthy! You win! What have you won? Who are you now? Where do you locate meaning? Why do you do what you do? Why are we here?
Reich and Buddhist Thought Convergence?
Reich's Self-Knowledge scale of what he calls 'Personality Drugs' organize as follows:
A. I want it now.
B. I want to be loved.
C. I want to be in charge.
D. I want to be the smartest person in the room
E. I want to feel safe.
This looks to me a lot like a breakdown / overview of fear-led desires.
Our complex, unpredictable, beautifully tumultuous world today asks us to release and accept a great deal. Accept some level of loss and difficulty. Let go of fears, let go of fear-driven desires, let go of expectations that you can plug in and turn off. There will be no sleepwalking through this precious life. Engage. Collaborate. Create. We make the road by walking.
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