The Way Opens: Quitting for Your Life, Part 2

This is not my story, but it is so evocative of my own life experience that it moved me. I ran into this book in the used book aisle last night. It's about a sociologist that becomes an educational reformer, writer and a Quaker. The most recent door that closed in my own life happened this September 13th. Typically I would bang on closed doors. It's necessary to feel the emotions that rise up and if it takes weeks to mourn so be it, but doors have closed enough times that I know the pattern.

Every exit is an entry somewhere else. - Tom Stoppard

It was time to let my life speak. The title of the book, Let your Life Speak, is also a Quaker expression that reminds me of Gandhi's quote: My Life is My Message.

Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray. - Rumi

The book is one person's story and I suppose if it has a point to make it would be this passage:

As May Sarton reminds us, the pilgrimage toward true self will take "time, many years and places." The world needs people with the patience and the passion to make that pilgrimage not only for their own sake but also as a social and political act.

This is Parker J. Palmer's life story greatly condensed for a blog post.

By surviving passages of doubt and depression on the vocational journey, I have become clear about at least one thing: self-care is never a selfish act - it is simply good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on earth to offer to others. Anytime we can listen to true self and give it the care it requires, we do so not only for ourselves but for the many others whose lives we touch...

By the time I began my sabbatical at Pendle Hill...I had been in Washington, D.C., for five years, growing more fearful every day that I was living a life not my own. I was thirty-five years old and had a Ph.D. and decent references, so finding a new job would have been no great problem, not in that place and time. But I wanted more than a job. I wanted deeper congruence between my inner and outer life...

When I arrived and started sharing my vocational quandary, people responded with a traditional Quaker counsel that, despite their good intentions, left me even more discouraged. "Have faith," they said, "and way will open."

After months of deepening frustration and seeing "approaching middle age at warp speed", the author seeks the advice of an older Quaker woman, Ruth.

"I'm a birthright Friend," she said somberly, "and in sixty-plus years of living, way has never opened in front of me." She paused, and I started sinking into despair...

Then she spoke again, this time with a grin. "But a lot of way has closed behind me, and that's had the same guiding effect."

Like many middle-class Americans, especially those who are male and white, I was raised in a subculture that insisted I could do anything I wanted to do, be anything that I wanted to be, if I were willing to make the effort....

I can still touch the shame I felt when, in the summer before I started graduate school at Berkeley, I experienced my first serious comeuppance: I was fired from my research assistantship in sociology.

Having been a golden boy through grade school, high school, and college, I was devastated by this sudden turn of fate. Not only was my source of summer income gone, but my entire graduate career seemed in jeopardy; the professor I had come to Berkeley to study with was the director of the project from which I had been fired. My sense of identity, and my concept of the universe, crumbled around my feet for the first, but not last, time...

The culture I was raised in suggested an answer: I had not worked hard enough at my job to keep it, let alone succeed...it is true that I did not work hard enough to keep that job, and so I lost it.

But that truth does not go deep enough - not if I am to discover the meaning of "way closing" behind me. I was fired because that job had little or nothing to do with who I am, with my true nature and gifts, with what I care and do not care about...

...I should have quit that job under my own steam or settled in and done the work properly. But sometimes the "shoulds" do not work because the life one is living runs crosswise to the grain of one's soul. At that time of my life, I had no feeling for the grain of my soul and no sense of which way was crosswise. Not knowing what was driving me, I behaved with blind but blissful unconsciousness - and reality responded by giving me a big and hard-to-take clue about who I am: way closed behind me.

Neither that job nor any job like it was in the cards for me...

The despair that took me from teaching sociology at Georgetown to the community at Pendle Hill contained a call to vocational integrity. Had I not followed my despair, and had Ruth not helped me understand it, I might have continued to pursue a work that was not mine to do...

When way closes behind us, it is tempting to regard it simply as the result of some strategic error: had I been smarter or stronger, that door would not have slammed shut, so I redouble my efforts, I may be able to batter it down. But that is a dangerous temptation. When I resist way closing rather than taking guidance from it, I may be ignoring the limitations inherent in my nature - which dishonors true self no less than ignoring the potentials I received as birthright gifts.

[T]here is as much guidance in way that closes behind us as there is in way that opens ahead of us...

As often happens on the spiritual journey, we have arrived at the heart of a paradox: each time a door closes, the rest of the world opens up. All we need to do is stop pounding on the door that just closed, turn around - which puts the door behind us - and welcome the largeness of life that now lies open to our souls. The door that closed kept us from entering a room, but what now lies before us is the rest of reality.

That paradox takes me back to Pendle Hill and the moment when Ruth taught me the meaning of "way closing." As I sat there fretting about the doors that had slammed in my face, I was sitting in the very place where my world would soon open wide.

Had I been able to see my own future at that moment, I would have laughed even harder than I did when Ruth's words exposed my inner mess. My future had already arrived, and its name was Pendle Hill - the place where my yearlong sabbatical stretched on for a decade, where I deepened my experience with alternative education and started learning a new way to teach, where my struggle to understand myself and the world drew me into the writing that has become so central to my vocation.

My anxiety about way not opening, the anxiety that kept me pounding on closed doors, almost prevented me from seeing the secret hidden in plain sight: I was already standing on the ground of my new life, ready to take the next step on my journey, if only I would turn around and see the landscape that lay before me...

We must take the no of the way that closes and find the guidance it has to offer - and take the yes of the way that opens and respond with the yes of our lives. - Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation, by Parker J. Palmer

Your work is to discover your life and with all your heart give yourself to it. - Buddha