On Becoming Someone
An offering: To stop living in our plans and start living in our lives.
November 5, 2020 — To my friend LG
25.364334°, -81.121068° Everglades National Park – Maxar Technologies
We’re often spellbound by the idea of “becoming someone”. Too often, we refine the blueprint of our future at the sacrifice of collaborating with our present.
This offering seeks to break that spell, so we stop living from our plans and start living in our lives.
It’s no coincidence that this is the first essay to ever escape my dusty notebooks. What else could pull my future hopes — of writing, and of learning more from having written — out of the clouds and into action today? What else, but this medicine?
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It took six words.
It was yet another typical conversation about my professional growth. I was describing my usual set of ambitions and plans, ending with “and someday, I’d like to have a hospitality and design consultancy.”
“Well, you don’t have one now,” he responded.
Typically, when we speak about the person we want to become, we use the future tense, as if they’re a different person. Others then smile and nod, offer praise and feedback on our plans, but leave our present self untouched, off the hook.
His six words broke the spell, shattering the safe, saccharine separation between my future and present self. “There must be a reason why not,” he added.
I realised I was waiting to become someone. We’re all waiting. But waiting for what?
Waiting to complete the interim steps
Waiting to build courage and take the leap
Waiting, actually hoping, to become someone quite different
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Why do we turn our lives into some version of medical school?
Too often, we wait for acceptance into the ordained program, wait until we have the ordained number of years of work experience, wait until we saved the ordained number of dollars. Step 1, step 2, step 3, step 4, and then — finally! Step 5, when we’ll finally be ready, allowed, permitted to write the book, to start the company, to travel the world, and to become that someone we’ve always wanted to become.
Yes, plans, priorities, and paths play an important role in our lives. But we must not substitute them for our lives. We must not mistake their borders for prisons, their guidelines for gospel.
Look out into the forest, and show me a flower that requires 2 years experience to smile at and smell. Show me a valley you need a PhD to enter and explore. These types of steps don’t exist in nature, only in society — but fewer than we think.
While some steps are compulsory, often inequitably so, to participate in society, most are not — just accidental norms and safe defaults. Whether your life’s steps feel compulsory, important, or accidental doesn’t change the fact that they are imagined.
And if they’re imagined, you can reimagine them — especially with the support of friends who hold the field of possibility open — into steps that serve your life, and you can stop living a life that serves steps.
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What if we just started Step 5 today?
Too often, we assume this requires a major leap, and major courage — quitting our job, replacing friends, moving out. After all, you’re leaping from Step 1 — over Step 2, 3, and 4 — to step 5, aren’t you? But Step 5 isn’t a destination, it’s just an idea. No need to leap there, every molecule of you, all at once.
Imagine your idea of Step 5, tenderly cup it in your left palm, and look closely at its shimmer. What about it calls and compels? In a Step 5 day, what do you create, speak, sing that you can’t today?
What if you could act like that, in a small way, tomorrow? A tiny instance of Step 5, no major leap, no major courage required.
Often, we love our current life — much more than we tell ourselves — and it’s a relief to keep most of it while sampling the spices of our biggest becoming.
At first, it can hurt to stare directly at “it”, who you really want to become. Too often, we repeat the same headlines for years, never reading the text. Too often, we identify with the abstract hope of becoming, instead of feeling the responsibility in our bones to start today.
But after a few faltering moments, your eyes will adjust. The Steps’ narrow hallway walls will melt, The Leap’s cliff will reveal itself as an open meadow. It’s beautiful, but presents a new challenge: if you are free to go anywhere, where do you go?
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What if the person we’ll become is much bigger than what we can imagine?
Our idea of “it” is limited by our perspective today. Although informed by a few fresh leaves of hard-plucked personal experience, our future projections mostly blend store-bought archetypes and stale stories of other people’s lives.
And deep down, part of us understands this completely. That’s the third reason we wait. The person we imagine becoming is too small, too generic. We can’t simply can’t imagine that far ahead — and don’t want to.
So we wait, hoping for our life to unfold with all the shocking shape and colour of a tropical flower we’ve never seen before. We want the surprise, and fear disturbing its unfolding.
So, we refrain from acting on the lifeless blueprint we’ve drafted, because deep down, we know when we live only from our plans, we’re already dead.
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But what’s it like to truly collaborate with life? To take life’s slightly sweaty hand, and dance with her?
Collaboration is the opposite of control. It’s a new type of action, and leads to a new type of becoming. Outcomes are unknown, and mystery is a continuous sign of success. Openness is the paper, and responsiveness is the pen. The plan and control approach, with its lonely blueprints and battles, turns into dance and discussion with life herself.
Compounded over years, daily collaboration adds up to something quite different than daily control. Yes, you’ll still become someone. But someone far bigger, more specific, less expected, than any idea of who you want to become today — you’ll become you.
This is the great invitation of our life, and too often we reject it, hedging back to the average on some path we decided was proper years ago.
The person you’ll become isn’t out there in the future, awaiting your arrival through flawless execution of your plans. You’re the sum total of your collaboration with life — starting now, in the present — and you’re already here.
Today, you are your ancestor.