Our teachers ask us not to leave our future to chance, to the roll of the dice. They ask us to prepare for the future, to arrive at adulthood with all the information we need to live a life of our own thoughtful making. In other words, to design the life we plan on living.
And yet, we tend to arrive at adulthood lacking the tools to live a life of our own design. Maybe it’s because we didn’t listen when the valuable information was delivered. After all, we’re smart and insightful and we know lots of stuff. And, thanks to the oversized American ego that we’re all introduced to and inevitably accommodate, we can’t help but believe we’re masterminds. We just knew how our lives should and would turn out!
However, at this point, we may recognize how much of the life we are living just happened to us. One thing happened. Then another. Then another. And now that’s the life we have — its mood and intelligibility often at the effect of the unintended consequences of important choices we didn’t make.
No one gets it all right all the time, of course. Much of life is an experiment. No rulebook takes the guesswork out of our moment-to-moment, day-to-day encounter with life. We are in the world, a manifestation of possibility, a subject of the world as we find it, on its terms.
Yet by default and of course not entirely, we are also the author and authority of our lives. We imagine, conjecture and experiment with possibilities. And in our lives, we are monitors who may record the results.
Sometimes we try to be detached, an objective observer. At other times, we’re at a loss, enervated, at wit’s end. How do we develop our autonomous perspective and the character of our thinking while wresting command of the force of our nature? Aren’t we always called upon to reckon with this reflexive, destabilizing immediacy? What if our hard-wired and passion-filled emotional nature is at odds with the need to engage the trials and tribulations of civilized living or if what needs doing in a crowded, complex world is not a happy match for what we feel like doing?
On the other hand, as I said, we’re smart. With a good deal of thoughtful examination and the exercise of independence, we can discover how is it that we fit into nature and into our civilization and shape our lives accordingly.
We can learn how to account for our subjective experience. We can educate the senses and sensibilities that give our experience shape and resource and our contribution to others meaning and efficacy. These practices are at the heart of command, a means to grab hold of a living system rocked by immediacy and the inevitable anger and discontent that accompany a lack of absolute command.
Indeed, it is this thoughtful groundwork that allows for real masterminding. Yes, we never get it all right all the time. But as a result of our focused effort to live an examined life — one of our own thoughtful design, we find ourselves in a position to extend our creative and resilient resources to all of life’s opportunities.
Arnold Siegel is the founder of Autonomy and Life and the leader of its Retreat Workshops and Advanced Classes.