For the past year things have been shifting under my surface, sometimes stressed and buckling as they squeeze past one another. It's long felt it's too premature to comment, that even I must wait and see. The cocoon's twitches are mere suggestions of the process it contains. And then lately, a couple more long-held hangups have felt ready to relax.
With much hindsight, one of my great sophomorisms has been to mistake independence, or any single moment of shift, for growing up. On the one hand, all the things we've been, including children, do not burn off to leave behind an adult in the ashes. They are still with us, although their salience shifts. And on the other, there really is no completely grown-up goal to reach. We keep being faced with more instances of our naïveté. Although independence, or rather responsibility, is an essential ingredient, there is much more to stewarding this process well. That more holistic art might be called self-parenting or self-coaching—whatever role you prefer to give that voice in there.
It can be useful to peruse the collective wisdom of how to live, but only if what you learn gets embodied in your life. Having missed this point, I searched exhaustively for the missing outside idea, tactic, or entity that might complete my adulthood. But I am now convinced that there is no other way: self-parenting is an ongoing process; one must commit to it as a practice; adulthood is the emergent appearance.
The last few months have more and more revolved around constructing a practice of life: opening up to committing at all, building and adjusting a bit at a time, and, as the difficulties come, trusting the process and sticking with it. In so many ways, it is a matter of taking my own damn advice and remembering how strong I am. The single best self-advice for me has been:
The only sustainable, truly tenable relationship with oneself or the world is one of compassion.
So much loosens and shifts, all on its own, when held in this way. The pupa gets go do its work.
There is one definite change to report: my career.
Several things are in alignment. I need to focus on a single, regular, sustaining job for a while, and such a job happened to be on offer. It seems the time is due to get some space from the mode of coaching, and to grow in directions it did not make room for, so that I might eventually return to being/people work from an updated angle.
So I made a project this summer of winding down my clients in an orderly fashion. It's done. I'm no longer a coach.
To be clear, and perhaps oxymoronically given most of this post, I haven't stopped being myself. I'm still ready to nerd out around the art of living. It's just that I'm now doing it as any other civilian rather than in service.
This website was initiated alongside my taking up coaching, so it too is in flux, although I intend to continue keeping my web home here.
Onward...