We moved last week. Didn’t have cable or Internet until last night. Here I am, writing you, instead of watching the finale of Top Chef Masters. It’s caused me to think about how many of our choices lead to other choices, which lead to others. Like, how choosing our new house led to choosing a new rug, which led to choosing to paint, which led to painting accidents, which led to needing to do laundry….you get my point. Choices also lead away from other options. As I tell my clients: “You always have choices,” and “not making a choice is still a choice.”
Author Parker Palmer talks about farmers on the great plains in the 1800s. He describes how at the first sign of a blizzard, these gritty and smart individuals would run ropes from the back door of their house out to the barn. The rope was for holding onto when they couldn’t see right in front of their face, so they would be able to get where they needed to go. They all knew stories of people who had wandered off and been frozen to death, having lost sight of home during a whiteout while still in their own backyards.
These days, it can feel like we live in a blizzard of another sort. Blizzards show up in our personal as well as professional lives. They can be as straightforward as a new job or new relationship; or the ending of one of those. A blizzard can be dealing with the chaos of moving house (my personal blizzard this week). Indirectly, a blizzard can swirl around us as fear, blame, anger, relational pain, separation, greed, deceit, selfishness. We all know stories of people who have wandered off into this kind of chaos and been separated from their own souls, losing their bearings. It might be more subtle than obvious, but the result is consistently significant. Loss of direction and focus, and an increasingly desperate need to right oneself and get back on course.
Lost ones are everywhere. Outwardly successful people, some who are lost at this moment and are trying to find their way back home, some lost but don’t know it, some wanting to be lost. Or people who openly evidence their lostness; they speak often of feeling confused and disoriented and seek clarity and purpose wherever they can find it.
We are all at various points in the journey. Sometimes it takes an interruption of the journey for us to notice that we are way off track. To realize that we let go of the rope some time ago and have no flipping idea where we are. Or how to get back to where we started. For others, an interruption serves as a kind of proving ground, where our self leadership shows itself and we are exactly where we want to be.
Sometimes, when we are lost, we can feel like our inner self, or our soul, is so lost from us that it will never be found again. That we have lost all power and presence. That we will never (again) have the agency to lead our own lives. It’s a terrifying place to be; the ultimate gut-check. I’ve been there. I bet you have, too.
My own experience of the blizzard, which includes getting lost in it more often than I like to admit, tells me that the soul cannot truly be lost. It may be obscured by whiteout or difficult to find for a bit, but all the time we are still just in the souls backyard, with chance after chance to regain our bearings.
It’s much harder to lose ourselves than we think it is.
Self leadership is ultimately about tying a rope from the back door out to the barn so that we can find our way, no matter what happens.
Because when we can see our souls, we can begin to lead our own lives. We lead ourselves through the blizzard without losing our hope or our way. And we make it to our destination.
In the coming months, some of my friends will be sharing about the ropes that they cling to in the midst of their journey. Each will be telling us about a recent time in their life when they have exercised self-leadership. I’m thrilled to welcome them to TMP and, just like last time, ask for you to please give them more grace than critique. Not because they deserve it- although they do- but because it is damn. hard. to talk about this stuff in a way that compels people to be all in. And they’re going for it. So let’s support all those seeking to hold fast to the rope. Press on.