Something incredible just happened. Sat in my London bedroom on a cold November morning finalising the draft for this post, I saw the most brilliant shooting star I have ever seen. Larger, bolder, brighter by several orders of magnitude, it grabbed my attention quickly enough for me to see its short, broad blaze in the sky before it faded from our atmosphere. Among the fading flash of white I swear I saw a tinge of green. It was bright enough to remain imprinted on my retina for a good while after – long enough to realise my jaw was literally wide open, my gawp developing into a grin.
(For context, I’m a big enough astronomy geek to have the Perseid meteor shower in my calendar as an annual reminder, and have seen many meteors and photographed some. Yet this was a stand out experience, one to remember. And I would never have seen it if I hadn’t got up early to write.)
Despite the joy of posting my first piece on Destiny and Chosen Ones, I’ve spent a lot of time wondering whether I should continue investing my time on these. Don’t be fooled by the short period of time that’s passed between the last post and this one – I’ve spent many years wanting to share this kind of writing and holding myself back for one reason or another. So these last few days had a couple of cumulative decades of mental back-and-forth to draw upon. But a great conversation last night helped me clarify my purpose, and a brilliant flash of white and green gave me the confirmation I needed.
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Something strange happened. It was around the time that I was reflecting on the nature of destiny and rejecting the notion of it being pre-determined in favour of something more self-led. (See Destiny Pt 1.)
Carl Jung was swirling around in my head after recently reading his memoirs, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, and I had just started his bizarre and magical The Red Book. He refers a lot to ‘visions’ and their importance in progressing his formal research mapping the inner workings of the subconscious mind. For example, it’s possible to trace the link between some of his Red Book visions through to the commonly used Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. He also describes how understanding the subconscious and integrating it into our waking life is essential in our route towards individuation – in layman’s terms, becoming our whole true self.
Yet I wasn’t clear on how one could use visions and dreams to access the subconscious. After all, dreams are random and difficult to interpret, and any waking thought involves the conscious mind, thereby blocking access to the subconscious. How do you sidestep rational thought?
I was experimenting a lot with meditation at the time. (Lockdown: what else was there to do?) While Jung advocated for exploration of the subconscious by letting go of the conscious mind, it turns out that meditation stills the turbulent conscious mind long enough for thoughts to rise up from the deep.
It was then that it happened, calm and unsolicited, my vision on destiny and fear.
I did not choose to have this vision, but I’m glad I did. It was instructive. (Note: No controlled substances were used in this experiencing, no trance-inducing Amazonian tree frogs were harmed. Tangent pending on meditation.) Most of the thinking I explain below I knew implicitly at the time, and I have made it explicit here for clarity.
So here we are. Batshit crazy or saner than the 9-5, this was my meditative vision. Roll with it, there are lessons within.
(Fire Phantasy by Maurits Verbiest, CC BY 2.0, cropped)
A VISION
I drop into the vision and find myself in a vivid landscape of flowing lava, shimmering heat hazes, scorched air and charred rocks. Towering improbably high above the glowing magma, narrow bridges of rock crisscross and link together forming a path beneath my feet.
On the horizon I see the greatest hope. It’s a wordless expression of that universal desire buried within us all to become the person we are capable of being. It fills a broad stretch of the horizon with the perfect clarity of its message.
This hope is a pure manifestation of what Carl Jung named individuation, what Abraham Maslow described and Scott Kaufman revived as self-actualisation, what Viktor Frankl prescribed through logotherapy as purpose, and what Bronnie Ware discovered through regrets of the terminally ill as the courage to live a life true to ourselves rather than the life others expected of us. It is also what Paolo Coelho’s old king described to the boy as destiny (see previous Tangent on Destiny Pt 1: Not Another Chosen One).
The hope is beautiful. It contains all the meaning of our lives, attainable and real.
It should make this a land of bright greenery, vibrant life and prosperity. But that’s not the case, and I know why.
Fear.
The one fear that matters most in life dominates the middle distance. It looms before our greatest hope and threatens to block the route. While the hope represents our self-determined destiny – the truest expression of who we can be and whom we must become – the fear represents the reason why so few of us pursue it.
THE FORK AND THE FEAR
This is the lesson that my subconscious has brought me here to learn. The path to both the greatest fear and the greatest hope is the same, but there’s a fork in the path. It lies hidden far away, so to get a better view I progress through this land of danger and peril.
The further I walk along the narrow rocky path, the clearer this One True Fear looms. It is the most significant and dangerous fear in our lives specifically because it is the fear that we tried and we failed. It shows us the pain and shame we would suffer if we summoned up courage to live a life true to ourselves, committed to action, made sacrifices, did everything in our power to pursue our dream, to become the fullest, most authentic expression of ourselves… and still failed. It would crush us. It would be far worse than simply not trying. At least, that’s what the fear would have us believe.
For some this fear may lay dormant. For the happy few already living a life full of purpose and meaning, the fear is behind them and has little relevance. Likewise, for people who are so far away from that hope, so accustomed to living without seeking purpose, without listening to that irritating yearning for meaning, this fear is barely a speck on the horizon. So it lurks, laying in wait for those courageous enough to travel this far along the path, ready to rear angrily up in defiance as they approach their hardest trial on the way to fulfilment.
I have come this far. It’s taken me years of striving and here it is, the fork posing its great question: Can I continue? Do I dare try?
Not yet.
I watch, and learn. From my vantage point on the path, I gain fresh insights into the hidden strength of this fear.
It is powerful not because it’s scary but the opposite, it’s comforting, inviting, warm. Fear is safe. Listen to its counsel: Don’t try those difficult, risky things. What if you try and people find out? You will expose yourself in the trying, then fail, and your deepest, most vulnerable desires will be laid bare. And they’re all just so laughable.
No. Stay indoors. Have another cup of tea. Read some messages. Browse those socials. Pay some bills. Live the routine of your current life. Don’t start making big decisions to change your life then actually start acting on them. It’s following your dream that’s scary. Much safer to listen to the fear, not to act in spite of it. If we never try to live our desired life, the one hope tells us is possible, then we can never fail. Failure avoidance is the most important thing in life, as we all know. So, by not trying, the possibility of success always remains – a blanket of imagined opportunity to comfort us in our darkest nights of regret.
A NICE WARM BLANKET
And so we hide. So many of us. We hide behind the comforting truth that if we never risk it, if we never try to live a life true to ourselves, we can never fail at it. We comfort ourselves, living in the numbed consolation that had we tried we might have succeeded. We might have done.
Spoiler alert: This approach is a one-way ticket to old age regrets of a life not lived. If that seems far-off, intangible, try reflecting on how you would feel on your death bed, knowing you never tried. (Tangent pending on projected hindsight.)
This fear kills us before we die. It’s effective because it’s comforting, poisonous because it prevents us from living before we give ourselves a chance to try.
This comforter takes many forms. I might have made it as an entrepreneur if I really put my mind to it, but I have a stable salary and life’s good enough; I might have been a successful sportsperson if I’d had different opportunities, but I’m too old now and too busy to practise that hard; I might pass the application process and excel in that prestigious, elite role if I apply, but I can’t face another rejection right now; I might have gone for that big, adventurous life change, but there were just too many variables, too many risks.
Conditionals. I might… I might… I might. It doesn’t fulfil us, but it seems more comfortable than trying and failing. Better to keep living the life we’re living than to fail at anything big, right?
Wrong. Failure shouldn’t be feared. (Tangent pending on Failure paves the road to success.) Failure is one of the most fruit-bearing seeds we can ever plant, full of growth.
But fear doesn’t want us to know that failure leads to growth, so it lies. It prevents us from even trying to live a life true to ourselves, because if we don’t try we don’t fail, and if we don’t fail then there’s always the possibility that things might have been different. ‘I might have…’ (Enjoy the brutally honest lyrics of Reverend and the Makers’s Heavyweight Champion of the World.)
Perhaps even stronger, even more insidious, it whispers to us ‘I might yet’. It pretends that it’s keeping our options open while we avidly pursue none. This open-ended possibility of future dream-pursuing acts as a calamine, soothing the itch of something irretrievably lost: past opportunities. It also eases the yearning for things-yet-to-be just long enough to creep us towards life’s end where we will stop, look back and realise that we never risked striving for the things that matter to us most.
THE CAVE
From my vantage point high on this rocky path above molten destruction, I piece together these fresh insights with fragments gleaned from elsewhere (such as Stephen Pressfield’s incredible The War of Art – a must read). I see how they connect in a new light, bathed in the orange glow from below.
The fear would block us from pursuing our truest expression of ourselves. But nothing matters more, and I don’t want to leave life to a ‘might yet,’ so I must do what the fear wants me to do least. I must embrace it, risk that fear becoming my new reality, cast aside the soothing balm of ‘I might yet…’.
I must risk complete, irreversible failure.
So I approach the fork and see that it wasn’t just hidden by distance. It’s obscured within a vast cave.
Hewn from rock and looming high above the molten lava flows lurks the huge form of a snake’s mouth. Poised open with towering fangs of rock serving as entrance pillars, it marks the entrance to the dark cave. A single path enters and two paths leave. The fork lies within. What happens inside the cave, how the path forks, remains a mystery.
I contemplate entering pure darkness. Where will the path diverge? Will the fork present itself as some dilemma? Must we choose the right path? Is there no route to hope, merely failure as the fear would have us believe? Or is it based on skill, ability, natural born talent? Do we have what it takes, or will we slip? Will we follow the way downwards, closer to the heat of destruction, closer to the feared outcome that We-Tried-And-Failed-And-All-Is-Lost? That all that self-belief in our potential was misplaced, and the truth of that hurts worse than never truly knowing? Will we publicly be proven a laughing stock to everyone we know and respect?
Or will the path lead to our hope, to living a life as our true self?
I firmly believe it is the latter, but here in this landscape I can’t see, can’t know for sure.
FAILURE WITHIN
Within this vision a part of me leaves the path, disembodied, to float inside the tunnel for a preview inside the cave to see what I might learn about this fork.
The answer is laughably simple.
So long as we accept the pain, the failures and setbacks, there is a single, unbroken path that connects where our feet are presently and where we want them to be, that future path of hope we want to walk. Though it may twist, wind and turn, the path leading through the cave and all the way to our hope is unbroken. While there are multiple opportunities to depart, the path itself is whole and complete, hard but walkable. And it waits to walked.
Failure is one of many necessary steps on the path towards fully realising our true selves. (And this is the real purpose, not scoring points in society’s game of externally defined validation metrics.) Complete and final failure is never complete and final, not when we try to live a life true to ourselves, because doing so is itself the very act of living.
Failure is not an end but a growth spurt. It’s an opportunity to reinvent yourself. Or simply to learn how to try harder.
Fear is not an end but a means to an end. It’s a trick of the mind that gets you to stop trying. It’s a powerful illusion, sure, but an illusion nonetheless.
Lies. The cave entrance is not a snake’s mouth, merely rock. It can’t bite, only scare.
And as for those forked paths within, the only real failure is reaching the end of this wonderful opportunity called life to realise you never tried to live the life you deserve.
Mark this next point, it’s subtle but crucial: Failure and fear of failure are two completely different things. Failure itself is an opportunity for growth and learning, even if painful. Fear of failure is a lie, and listening to that lie will rob you of the life you deserve. Always distinguish between the two. Embrace failure, shun fear.
This is the torch you must carry as you enter the cave.
A note on the journey...
There are in fact many caves. This is mine. In fact I’ve had several, but what I found on the other side was a path leading towards the horizon via another cave. And another. This one will doubtless lead to more, yet this is the one I’m facing now and I’ve been facing it for years. You too will have your own. It may take you years to find yours, and you may pass through many smaller ones to get to the cave that stops you dead in your tracks and leaves you staring into it, perhaps for years like I have mine.
For all I say about the illusion of fear, please don’t think I’m making light of it. The fear is visceral, scary, fierce. It feels real. More real than a ten tonne wall. I must convince myself of its illusory nature. Perhaps that’s what I’ve been doing all along, not trying to convince you but convince myself. Perhaps, perhaps, it might even be working.
We continue.
ENTER
Trust.
Enter the snake’s head. Enter the tunnel and with it a new phase of being, of pursuing hope in spite of fear. The fear that one can try all they might and still not become themselves is merely fear. It’s self-fulfilling only if we fulfil it. There is no path that leads to final, irreversible failure other than continuously failing to try.
With persistent steps forward and belief in oneself, committing daily to one’s actions, it is necessarily true that we will progress towards becoming our true self.
What lies inside the snake’s mouth is exactly what we choose, and trying to live is living itself.
If we choose to blur the distinction between fear of failure and quitting, then what lies within is a dangerous and incomprehensible divergence between two paths, with endless opportunities to leave the path to hope and join that slippery path leading down towards the fear.
If we choose to believe that failure-avoidance is the goal in life, and that quitting is safe, then all is simple: Safer not to try. We return to the beginning, far from all of this, and never to set out in pursuit of our life’s purpose again.
But the choice is ours to make.
Let’s all be clear on this right now: There is only one path to one’s self.
Choose to believe that failure is not final, merely growth. Choose to believe in committing to persistent action in the pursuit of your dream. Choose to believe with conviction that it’s your choice to make. Do these things and you will see inside that there is only one path, the one that leads to becoming your true self. Destiny has a forked tongue, and I will walk the single path to myself.
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