Lateral Drift...

Deconstruction is a bitch. Just ask anyone that has gone through the process. To take something apart - be it your home, your career, or even your own assumptions and beliefs takes a tremendous amount of mental effort, and no small amount of courage either.

I have friends that are working through this process right now. Some are leaving careers either by choice or by cutbacks, others are leaving marriages that have ceased to function, others are leaving home, some are finishing school. All of them are looking for their path. I have taken apart my life brick by brick once before so I know there are a lot of misnomers out there about the process of deconstruction. The biggest one would be the amount of time it takes. If only life could be a series of well researched decisions, perfectly executed, with appropriate feelings and reactions in check - but it is never like that. It takes way longer than you imagine.

For me, deconstruction began with a profound feeling of 'stuckness' - a kind of paralysis. A feeling like I had to move, but had no idea where, or how, or why - just that what I was doing wasn't fitting any more. I felt like I was wearing a coat that was too small for me, pinching my shoulders, restricting my movement. And the feeling didn't go away. In fact, it just got worse. I remember saying to a friend of mine that I felt like my mind and my body were in a wheel chair, paralyzed totally, but I knew that my house was on fire. Profound feelings of need, or perhaps more accurately lack, combined with complete and total inability to imagine how or what to do. Being a type A personality, I naturally addressed this with a mamoth 'TO DO' list. No sir, I wasn't going down without a fight. I agressively renovated my house. I learned to cook exotic foreign meals. I monitored homework completion with military precision. I had a strict 'no television' policy. I had done the courageous thing, hadn't I? I had left a good job, comfortable wage, and years of service to rediscover what I wanted from life. At the time, I fancied myself as somewhat of a maverick, allowing myself to be open to where the universe was going to direct me next. Proactively having my midlife crisis at thirty. And do you know what? The universe was totally silent. It gave no clues as to what to "be" next. Who was I without my job title? It was astonishing to discover how much that title had constructed my belief system.

In face of the inevitable dinner party question "what do you do?" I blanched. I talked around it, projects I was planning, books I was reading, traveling, and so on. "Being" a wife and mother didn't seem like an occupation to me because I always had other ways of identifying myself. It is funny to always be on the wrong side of things. When I worked, I felt like I was being torn in two directions where the boys were concerned and what I wanted to accomplish for myself. 'Could I?' was rapidly becoming 'should I?' When I left work, I felt like I didn't have any ambition. I saw staying at home as losing myself. I think many women feel like that though. The innumerable amount of hats we're supposed to wear comfortably, without question.

At any rate, my answers to the "what do you do?" question got cheekier and more defiant. I was sick to death of answering, and asking, that question. "What do you do?" "Whatever I want, whenever I want" was my imagined response. Said coyly, betraying no insecurity. Eventually, my answer was a simple "nothing." My sisters hated this. They didn't like that I would say that I was nothing. They would put on a fashion show of all of my hats, pushing me to choose one. I tried to explain that I really wanted to try being nothing for a change. That I wanted to see who I was without the definition. Without the box to check off in efficient red pen. On the way back from being something, sometimes you have to be nothing. Otherwise, it's not deconstruction.

You would think that being nothing would leave me wide open for self discovery. Like a tabula rasa, just waiting for the universe to make its mark. Hey universe, I'm open now. Undistracted. Ready for guidance... but still nothing. So, I started to panic. I voraciously read self-help books. I consulted the oracle. Several oracles, actually. I did Meyers Briggs tests that told me I was well suited to the field I just left. I worried and fraught. I examined the problem of 'being' from every logical perspective; I thought of little else. Slowly, I sank into despair. This question of what to be and what to do became larger than life. God forbid I didn't reach my potential (hi mom). Did I just totally fuck up my career? Did I, (gasp) fail?

I wish I could give my friends a map of how to find their answers. Or at least how to be nothing comfortably, patiently. One thing that I will say is that when conventional linear logic fails, allow your mind to drift laterally. Do something else unrelated. Think of other things. Give 'nothing' time to gel. And yes, being nothing and doing nothing is a viable option. Sometimes, when you have worried a problem to death, it's the only thing left to do.

Below is an excerpt from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Prisig. It was in deceased friend's book collection; Dave sending us his wisdom from beyond the grave. I have always said that the right book always finds me at the right time - at the moment when I most need it.

"Yes and no...this or that...one or zero. On the basis of this elementary two term discrimination, all human knowledge is built up. The demonstration of this is the computer memory which stores all of its knowledge in the form of binary information. It contains ones and zeros and that’s all.
Because we are unaccustomed to it we don’t usually see that there’s a third possible logical term equal to yes and no which is capable of expanding our understanding in an unrecognized direction. We don’t even have a term for it, so I use the Japanese mu. Mu means “no thing”. It points outside the process of dualistic discrimination. Mu simply says “No class; not one, not zero, not yes, not no.” It states that the context of the question is such that a yes or no answer is in error and should not be given. “Un-ask the question” is what it says. Mu becomes appropriate when the context of the question becomes too small for the truth of the answer” (288).

I love that last part: "Mu becomes appropriate when the context of the question becomes too small for the answer." It is one thing to wrap your head around it theoretically, it is quite another to actually apply it to your life. All of this meditation on 'destiny' and 'paths' and 'being' was getting me nowhere. It wasn't until I 'un-asked' the question, that I started to drift. It wasn't until I started to drift, that I found what I was looking for. Not total illumination, more just a glimmer. Slowly, things started to take shape. That isn't to say that I didn't hit roadblocks. I had to start later than I wanted. There were hoops to jump through. Questions of deservedness that needed to be answered on my part and theirs. But because I wasn't asking the question and wasn't paying attention for the 'signs,' I didn't get weighed down by them.

And whaddya know? Here I am, standing on a path. No list of pros and cons, no Failure Modes and Effects analysis, no Ishikawa diagram, no stakeholder analysis gave me the answer. I just wandered into it. Mu, totally.