Hero’s Journey

How you drive reveals your true character

A man’s true character gets revealed in situations where social norms no longer apply. Take the looting in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, for example. In times of social crisis, when things fall apart, when there are no rules, when it’s a free-for-all, a man’s agreements with himself are all he has left to guide him. Of course, none of us would raid the tills just because the roof has lifted off in a hurricane and the cameras are all bust – or would we?

Let’s look at the way you drive your car: do you race up behind someone and force them to move out of your way? Do you get incensed when they don’t, like you have a right to behave that way? Of course you do! Question is, would you do the same in a bank queue?

Inside the bubble of the car, all you have
left is your agreement with yourself

You wouldn’t, and the only limiting factor is not the security guard – it’s that people can see your face, that their eyes fall directly on you; their staring would burn holes in the back of your neck if you pushed past them; if you turned to look at them you’d make eye contact; some might actually attack you. Inside the bubble of the car there’s no such possibility of contact, so all you have left is your agreement with yourself about how you choose to behave towards others – even when no-one’s looking. What’s your agreement? Do you have any?

After the charge of my coffee addiction blew, I saw the next one, perhaps the deepest of all: self-reflection. If I didn’t get time to self-reflect, the tension would rise and rise. Like a true addict, as soon as I knew I was safe (bond paid, costs covered) I would dip into myself; I would stare at my reflection in the lake for hours. Seeing it for what it was –  an addiction, instead of as a defining personality trait – was what caused the charge to blow.

The point is this, although it may be hard to see: many of the defining patterns of our lives are nothing but addictions. If you experience tension rising when you don’t get something – a drink, a smoke, an anger outburst, a bit of drama, a fight, a betrayal – or if you milk the experience for all its worth when it does happen – if you find yourself wallowing in it for much longer than you need to, in other words – then you’re very likely in an addictive self-abuse cycle with that thing. You can blow the charge by blowing all your addictions systematically, starting at the one that’s easiest and most accessible and working through every last one.

Heed your life’s warning mechanism – and get help

The body has a warning mechanism: pain. When you feel pain and you’re doing physical exercise, you’ve either reached your limit in a good way, or you’ve hurt yourself. You’ll rest, or see a physio. If you feel pain and you’ve been doing nothing, you’re likely to see a doctor.

Machines have a warning mechanism: they slow down, start making a terrible noise, or they simply stop working. If you fancy yourself as a handyman you’ll try to fix it yourself – until you realize that most modern machines, especially cars, require specialists who come armed with computers that they plug into the machine in order to diagnose the problem.

Just at the modern car needs an expert, so to does the modern life

Your life has a warning mechanism: frustration, confusion, depression. When you constantly feel frustrated, confused, or depressed in one or more areas of your life, there is an unmet desire in that area and either you don’t know how to fulfill that desire, or you lack the willingness to – perhaps meeting it would conflict with some of your values and so you talk yourself out of it.

Just as you would take your modern car to an expert for assessment and repair, so you need to take your modern life to an expert. Taking it to a friend is like doing a backyard job. Get an expert, and get a good one.

Deep down under all our addictions is the presence of self-love. I recently gave up coffee. It’s taken me years, and I’ve finally nailed the sucker, really nailed it. I’m not in some struggle to give it up either, it’s more like I’ve floated free. Sugar went with it, and a whole load of other things. What I was left with was me. No distractions.

It’s taken me years to be able to be present with me – to just look at myself, my life, with all its cracks and holes, all my deficiencies, and just be with it. With each step closer to being able to do that, I’ve lost more addictions, including the addiction to misery, pain and suffering. My lesson is this: if you work on yourself correctly, from the top down, layer by layer, those addictions simply float free. If you have addictions, the answer is not behavioural, it’s spiritual. It’s uncovering your essence until you can love yourself. In that space, addictions don’t hang around. It’s a long journey.

And so, forget the credit crisis, there’s a bigger wave still to hit us: the psychological credit crisis. Yes, all those anti-depressants are like buying happiness on credit. We still have to deal with the underlying issues. We still have to learn to love ourselves.

Being unmoved by outcomes has other applications

When a rugby match is being televised between two teams you don’t know or care about, it’s just a sports event playing on a screen in the corner. When it’s a cup final involving your favourite team and their arch-rivals, suddenly you’re involved as though your life depends on it. It’s the same physical reality, so why the heart attack in one instance and not the other? Because of the meaning you’ve created around your team winning.

Next time it’s your team, take a step back – even for a few seconds – and look at what’s going on. Take it a step further: see if you can have an interest in the outcome of the game without getting emotionally attached, without losing yourself. This is a good exercise for a valuable life skill: the ability to detach from outcomes.

If you can detach you can hold your centre in any situation

This may sound schizophrenic, but it’s possible to be completely committed to a goal, and completely detached at the same time. Basically, it’s having a strong preference for something to happen, and being unmoved if it doesn’t – not just for some things, but for everything.

How would having this skill benefit you? Firstly, you’d be able to take actions you wouldn’t take otherwise (because you’d be less afraid of losing). Secondly, you’d be able to hold your centre, your sense of self, no matter who walks in the room or what good or bad news you hear.

The second phase of life requires some serious relearning. I have so much new information I feel like a kid all over again – like an invalid learning to walk. I find myself heading off in a direction, making decisions, then realise that I’ve dropped a ball I picked up a few weeks ago – I had to, in order to catch the new one coming in!

Then I want to unmake that decision to include the dropped ball plus the new information. Problem is, I’ve already made commitments, and I have bills to pay. The challenge is to swallow each new ball fast enough so that you can make each next decision with all the new information you have at hand.

How do you do this? By making room – by clearing out all the clutter in your head: every incomplete task, unfulfilled promise, unforgiven issue, unresolved argument, unmade decision. These are just a few categories, and should keep you busy for a while. When you get on top of this wave, you become the sharpest knife in the box.

When it’s over, it’s nobody’s fault

When we’ve grown out of a friendship but we don’t want to admit it; when we actually don’t like the person we’re with, but we don’t like what that says about us; when it’s time for us to leave a job, but we’re afraid… These are all situations in which we criticize and find fault with the other person – our friend, partner, boss, the company, or the political party we work for or support.

If there’s someone in your life who you’re in a conflict with – if you’re spending hours ruminating, going over all your arguments in your head, spending tons of energy trying to make them see the error of their ways, or trying to change them – have a careful look and see, are you just looking for reasons to justify what you really want, which is to leave the job, or end the relationship? Instead of letting things deteriorate, or finding fault until ‘you have no choice’, take responsibility. Make a decision and act on it. Resign. End the relationship. Move on.

There doesn’t have to be a win/lose
every time two people part

Consider that there may be nothing wrong, with them or with you. There doesn’t have to be a winner and a loser every time two people part. It’s simply that your time with them is up. And don’t be so arrogant as to think that they can’t live without you: they can!

The tricky thing about analysis is that you think you’re doing something useful – checking, making sure – when in fact you’re simply paralysed and unable to act.

Usually it’s some deep inner voice that holds us there, some core belief we picked up in childhood. In my case it was simply, ‘You’re an idiot, man!’ That sentence is deeply buried and flickers past like the notorious Coke ad spliced into a movie reel, and everything that follows – the other 34 frames a second of thought – seem to make sense: all my arguments appeared so reasonable. When I managed for a few seconds to get outside myself – like Einstein’s man watching from outside the train – I saw that while I thought I was moving, in fact I was sitting still.

To break the habit of analysis is the hardest thing to do, precisely because the very mind that does the analysis justifies itself doing it. It’s like being the judge at your own trial: you’re invested in believing your alibi. To get through it you have to make decisions that go against your mind, and you have to stick to them – you have to distrust your thoughts as mental spew and nothing else, and a good coach will help you to do that.