The first week of 2020 has come and gone. I look around, survey my surroundings, and notice that I’m okay. I take a few deep breaths, through the phantom anxiety in my chest. I stumble out into the world, maybe a list in hand, maybe no list, making an effort to keep moving.
This past week, I was in the fortunate position of getting to choose whether to stay on for another short contract with Holland America, or go back to Los Angeles indefinitely. It may not seem like a hard choice (cruise ship or Hollywood?), but I spent a good couple of weeks wrestling with it. I ultimately decided to take the other contract.
I ran into somebody the other day who said that turning 30 is the signpost of leaving adolescence. Well, I don’t know if that’s true for everybody. But I’d say a big part of “leaving childish things behind,” much like stepping into a new year, is knowing what’s important.
Although I push myself to get better at making music, music is not what’s most important to me. What’s most important to me is actually Self-Knowledge. Which, for me, is synonymous with Wisdom.
These are the tools with which we face the hard choices, the difficult decisions, which make up a lot of life.
In the book The War of Art (my favorite self-help book of all time), there is a section on a dream that a friend of the author had in which she was riding a bus. On this bus, Bruce Springsteen was the driver. The bus is going along smoothly, when all of a sudden Bruce lurches to a halt and leaps up. He turns to the author’s friend and urgently ushers her into the driver’s seat. He gets off the bus, leaving her the wheel. Now she’s the driver.
This scene struck me poignantly as a great illustration of Self-Reliance. To me, Springsteen represents anyone (or anything) that we’d rather let “take the wheel” of our lives. This can include parents, authority figures, older versions of ourselves—even God. All of these would fall into the category of things we “can’t control”—external forces that we must surrender to. But what happens when Springsteen hands us the wheel?
See, I don’t know anything about these external forces. I don’t claim to understand them anymore than I do God’s plan. But I do have a much better chance at understanding my Self. That part of me that governs my best actions, and non-actions (which are really actions too).
This doesn’t mean I can’t, or shouldn’t, consult with others who have their own wisdom. It doesn’t mean that I sometimes (many times) don’t get duped by an impostor self, a piece of ego or an idea or a compulsion that looks true or right but isn’t. And it doesn’t mean that there aren’t forces outside of me that are at work as well.
It does suggest that there is some untouched part of me that knows more answers than I sometimes remember to give it credit for. That I can stop looking to others so much for those answers. That I can trust something within me. That I can keep working to get closer to the truth of who I am.
And who’s to say that’s not God?
