Summary
How do we live and transmit the ideals of thriving to our children, protecting them from the forces that seek to constrain them?
I look to nature for guidance on how to set the conditions for thriving and to examine my own life to understand where my environment began to impede me. I see how I’ve allowed life to control my perspectives and limit my innate purpose, and I have started to take steps to reclaim it. Finally, I examine my role as a parent in identifying these forces in my children’s lives and how I can support them in living uninhibited and fully realized.
“The unexamined life is not worth living”
-Socrates
Unconstrained growth
The way I see it, we’re all brought into this world as seeds: tiny little balls with the potential to grow into something extraordinary. It’s the wonder of nature to look at a tiny seed and know that within it lies the potential for a hundred-foot oak tree.
To understand unconstrained growth, imagine a tree planted in the wild with ample sunlight and water. As it grows, its roots burrow deep and wide into the ground to provide a vast network and a firm footing for the tree. The trunk will be thick and sturdy, and the branches and leaves will flourish, bathing in the ample sunlight.
This is the true manifestation of the divine being within the seed. It faces the occasional hindrance of a long dry spell or a branch falling off, but otherwise, the tree thrives with just about nothing to inhibit it.
Photo by Simon Wilkes on Unsplash
A constrained life
But if you’ve ever seen a tree growing within a pot, you know what it’s like to see the beautiful potentiality of nature constrained against the limitations of its environment. Its growth is okay at first, while its roots still have room to grow, but eventually, they will come up against the container of the pot. The roots may bend and curve and will do their best to find ways to grow, but once the pot is full, the plant’s growth is restricted. The tree grows to but a shadow of its potential, constrained by its environment. Even if the plant is later removed from its container, its roots may already be “root bound,” continuing to stunt the growth and possibly kill the plant.
Photo by Tyler Gooding on Unsplash
There is still beauty in how nature expresses itself, even from within the harsh limitations of a container. It’s how I view myself, my parents, and everyone around me. We’re all doing our best to express ourselves from within the confines of our own pots.
How the pot forms
At birth, I was the tiny acorn with incredible potential. Over the years, I allowed the world to define and shape me, helping form the concepts of what I was and wasn’t good at, who I was, and who I should be. I internalized each experience, unknowingly constructing a container around who I was, and restricting who I could be. This is my pot: the accumulation of a lifetime of artificial and external limitations that I’ve built around myself.
A friend told me about “big T” and “little t” traumas, where a “big T” trauma is readily recognizable by the experiencer, like sexual assault or war. “Little t” traumas, however, are much smaller occurrences that affect us over time, but are often unbeknownst to us. Each time we internalize a self-limiting belief, we build and reinforce our pot which constrains our growth. The sources of these constraints are numerous and range from barely noticeable to significant, and include a wide range of inputs like our schooling, our media, and our corporate industrial society.
Constructed with fear
In school, I learned that we got assessed by a single metric: the grade. With no other actual measures from school and everyone else I knew going through it, I accepted this measurement of myself as law. Good grades, good college, good job, good life. I knew of nothing else and equated my performance (via my grade) in school to my self-worth.
My response was to put forth the minimum effort to get by. That was my goal: to get by. I reflect on it now and attribute my behavior to a response rooted in fear. Fear that if I genuinely applied all of my efforts to something, but failed, then I must be a failure. My logic: if I failed an exam but hadn’t bothered to study for it because I was occupied with other things (video games and friends while I was younger and alcohol and weed as I got older), I had the excuse that I didn’t try. I could tell myself and others that I could have excelled if I had been so inclined to want to. That was a more palatable outcome than risking putting forth my best effort and still coming in as “less than” someone else – failing.
I set myself up with excuses that both justified and caused my mediocrity.
All of this occurred just beyond my range of awareness. So I didn’t even notice how I would agonize between two or three options in front of me (pick a course, pick a major, pick a career), blind to the immeasurable number of other paths that had been eliminated from my consciousness by my fear of failure. The “opting out” route of consciously choosing not to put forth the work to try and excel resulted in closing the walls around my pot and my potential to explore real ways to live, exist, and contribute in this world. My roots had gotten glimpses of places they could grow but encountered the restrictions of my fear to reign them in. I had never understood that time and effort are all that’s required to push beyond a limit. The irony of the situation is that my fear of the judgment of people finding out my limits resulted in me residing within those limits.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
-Marianne Williamson
Somewhere along the way, I had allowed normalcy and uniformity to become my compass. What I know now is that failure is not unusual. It’s not the end, either. Failure is just a part of the learning and growing process; with time and effort, any goal can be achieved. This thoroughly liberating thought re-opens the possibility of pursuing what makes me happy rather than safe.
Looking in the mirror
As I chipped away at the notion that being busy was being successful, I began to ask myself if I was putting my time and energy towards things that made me happy. I worked 50-60 hours/week, draining myself at work and leaving the rest of my life as an afterthought. My health, responsibilities as a father, family, community, and creative expression were all relegated to a distant second. The time and effort required to pursue the wealth and career goals associated with just fitting in were not adding up compared to the cost of following them.
Photo by Daniel Tafjord on Unsplash
Over the past five years, I have been learning to undo the programming I’ve imposed on myself. I’m learning that I am capable of so much more than I ever would have allowed myself to think, and I’m learning that what brings me joy in this world doesn’t have to be what everyone else is working towards.
Photo by Rupert Britton on Unsplash
Where do I go from here?
A purpose is deeply personal to who you are: to be the GOAT (greatest of all time) if you’re Kobe or to bring humanity to Mars if you’re Musk. I lost sense of a more profound life mission and passion long ago, so I need time and space to explore and figure it out.
Maybe I’m already a “rooted plant.” At age 35, perhaps my new interest in Spanish won’t eventually compare to a native-born speaker, maybe my late start in surfing may never stack up to Kelly Slater, or maybe my foray into singing songs to my children won’t ever find me matching the chops of Adele.
However powerful the concepts of consistency and effort over time are, it doesn’t matter whether I reach those heights. I can still enjoy the ride. I can still love learning and speaking Spanish, I can still love every minute of learning the lifelong sport of surfing, and I can enjoy expressing love through music to my children.
For now, though, I can wipe my slate clean and figure out what all are worthy of my time and energy, and rebuild my life from the ground up:
- Physical and mental health
- Quality time with family
- Raising happy and healthy children who can thrive in an uncertain future
- Financial security
- Community
“I am an infinite being. I am not subject to this. I am only subject to that which I hold in my mind.”
-David Hawkins
My legacy to my children
“Be the change that you wish to see in the world”
-Mahatma Gandhi
The most crucial element of my role as a father is to be the person I want my child to learn from. When I find a disconnect between my actions and the words I share with my children, red flags go up, and a deep examination commences.
- If I allow fear to hold me back, will they learn the same behavior?
- If I condone an environment of grading, competition, and measurement, do I risk showing my children that the joy of learning and the innovation with risk-taking is second to the outcome of a grade?
- If I fail to give my life my best honest effort, will my children follow suit?
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
the courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
-Serenity Prayer
There is much in life that we cannot change. But contrary to what I used to believe, quite a lot of it can be. If I can identify some of the sources of my own container that are within my control, shouldn’t I seek to dispel them from constraining my children?
A request…
Out of the 8 billion people out there, I don’t believe that I’m alone. Certainly this will not strike a chord with most, but if this resonates with you, please show your support by helping forward this along via social media to anyone you think might value this. I am seeking to connect with those who can relate to my journey.