Let your life speak
Let Your Life Speak by Parker J. Palmer
Read for: A career transition that's really a life or vocation transition; quieting external chatter about what you should do with your life
“Let your life speak” is a Quaker saying, reinterpreted by Palmer in his 1999 book as a reminder to be still, tap into your inner wisdom, and build an “undivided life” by anchoring on your innate strengths. Nearly a quarter-century later, with the popularity of Brene Brown and StrengthsFinder, these themes are less groundbreaking than they may have felt before Y2K. It is helpful in clarifying that sometimes “career questions” are really about something deeper: vocation and meaning, spirituality and connectedness, independence and authenticity.
He starts with an anti-example: the most ethical way to live, defined as doing the least damage and the most good, is not to pick a list of values and working hard to live up to them. He gently pokes fun at this approach, which “reduce[s] the ethical life to making a list, checking it twice…then trying very hard to be not naughty but nice.” I found this view surprising, since I had imagined the author as a middle-aged, friendly but preachy mainstream Christian pastor. My experience of growing up in Korean Christian churches — and later, in corporate spaces for do-gooders — was exactly this approach of laying out values and moral rules of engagement, then living a life of disciplined striving for these ideals.
Instead, he makes the case for living in authentic selfhood. For when you give something that is integral to your own nature, it will renew itself effortlessly as you give it away, like a fruit tree dripping with ripe apricots. By contrast, picking a hero and trying your best to emulate them can lead to burnout and, he argues, harm to the people on the receiving end of your attempt at heroism.
Listening to your inner paramecium 🦠
Letting your life speak begins with quieting down to embrace both your inner wisdom and your limits. He observes that while teaching at retreats, people furiously take notes on what others have said — yet rarely write down what they've said themselves. This advice reminded me of Tara Mohr's Playing Big, a spiritually-inflected self-help book targeted at women, which includes a visualization exercise to imagine your “inner mentor.” I found this exercise helpful as a counterweight to the “inner critic” that we're often told to name with the hopes of domesticating it.
The inner critic or the “shadowy parts of ourselves” are also worth listening to, says Palmer. He humbly describes his experience of moving to progressively non-prestigious institutions as less of a confident decision, and more like “moving like a crab, sideways, too fearful to look head-on.” Upon reflection, he notes that it's worth paying attention to our instinctive responses — both ones that draw us to certain experiences and repel us from others — since they all provide useful information. This part resonated with me, because there's an analogy I've long been using in my head whenever I'm asked about what I want to do in ten years. I've wished I could tell my besuited interviewers that I'm just a paramecium, a single-celled organism that uses cilia to constantly sense the world around it, inching blindly toward the good and away from the bad.
Way will open
Palmer muses on another Quaker proverb, “Have faith and way will open.” He writes a delightful vignette about a time when he was staring woefully at closed doors.
Palmer: People keep telling me that way will open…I've been trying to find my vocation for a long time, and I still don't have the foggiest idea of what I'm meant to do. Way may open for other people, but it's sure not opening for me.
Quaker Friend: I’m a birthright Friend and in 60+ years of living, way has never opened in front of me.
Palmer: ….
Quaker Friend: …But a lot of way has closed behind me, and that’s had the same guiding effect.
A comforting analogy to reach for in times of rejection, though he acknowledges that not all closed doors are neutral. It requires discernment to say if the closed path is from “living crosswise to the grain of one's soul” versus imposed by “people or political forces hell-bent on keeping us 'in our place.''
This discernment can come with a little help from friends. I was fascinated by the Quaker “clearness committee,” a gathering with friends who don't give you advice but spend three hours asking you honest, open questions to help you discover your own inner truth. When evaluating one opportunity to become the president of an educational institution, they asked questions like, “What is your vision for this institution? What is its mission in the larger society? How would you handle decision making?” The hardest question for him: “What would you like most about being a president?” He listed all the things he would not like to do (e.g., giving up writing and teaching, gladhanding donors) until he sheepishly admitted that what he would like most was getting his picture in the paper next to the word president. They laughed and agreed he could find easier ways of getting his picture in the paper.
Existential dives
Palmer shares an experience of depression as a way to share the “hidden wholeness” that comes with an existential journey. I've come to see the invisible divide between those who have lived Mariana Trench-levels of deep pain and those in a bubble who have only heard stories about it. For those currently living in the second category, like me, it can be a disorienting experience to follow those in the first.
Many metaphors have been deployed to explain this divide: Brene Brown's “sympathy vs. empathy” video, Harry Potter's thestrals that appear only to those who have seen death, the ground motif in Ali Wong and Steven Yeun's Beef. These stories from Mariana Trench people tend to describe Bubble people as bumbling and awkward at best, carelessly callous and dismissive at worst. They're both true. Palmer unpacks why:
One of the hardest things we must do sometimes is to be present to another person’s pain without trying to “fix” it, to simply stand respectfully at the edge of that person’s mystery and misery. Standing there, we feel useless and powerless, which is exactly how a depressed person feels — and our unconscious need…is to reassure ourselves that we are not like the sad soul before us.
But reading this as a Bubble person is different from truly understanding it. It's nearly impossible to understand this message of bearing witness to pain without some prolonged proximity to it. It's why Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy urges proximity; why Paul Farmer urges accompaniment. So to the Bubble people: Make space in your life to sit with someone going through tough times. You'll mess up and say the wrong thing. You'll figure out how to do something right…at some point. Just try. Because by the end, we'll all visit the trench. We might as well experience it together.
Questions on questions on questions
Palmer suggests that sometimes, the answer to “what do I do with my life” leads to more questions: “the more elemental and demanding 'Who am I? What is my nature (limits as well as potentials)?” And further, “whose am I?” He writes about understanding the seed of true self as well as the ecosystem in which you were planted — “the network of communal relations in which I am called to live responsibly, accountably, and joyfully with beings of every sort.”
Unfortunately or fortunately, it's a lifelong journey with no final answers, which can sound exhausting. So isn't it more efficient, then, to find a way to live like the abundant, generous apricot tree, dripping with gifts for the world?
Read with: 📚The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron or Playing Big by Tara Mohr - the business-y self-help genre is often focused on the rational/intellectual, sometimes acknowledging the role of emotion. These books weave in the spiritual, if you're ready to get weird and explore a different plane of existence. David Brooks' The Second Mountain is a different flavor in this genre that is somewhat more accessible to intellectual-type people, if you're willing to pick and choose what's helpful while ignoring the rest.