More on Finding Your Place in the Herd
Just Like Horses, Humans Have an Innate Drive to Belong and to Contribute
Welcome to all my new readers and welcome back to all my faithful friends. I love that you are reading what I write. I love it even more when people hit that heart icon, comment (even if you donʻt “like”), and share what I have written. Thatʻs how I get feedback on whether my writing is an offer of value <wink>.
I ended the previous post about humans and their “herds” with more questions: So how do we listen for vocation? How do we find place and purpose? How do we move from listening to begin to make tentative offers, in order to find out which offers have value and will be accepted by the herd as our commitments to them?
These questions probably will take a couple more posts to unpack. If you have not already subscribed and want to get next installments by email, you can subscribe for free (or you can pay in which I case I will circulate the wealth by subscribing to another independent writer on Substack).
I was well versed in the literature on finding purpose or calling when Zara and I arrived in a Hawaiʻi in 2005, optimistically thinking it would be easy to find our herd and our place in it. She had no choice in the relocation, of course. I had chosen to move at a good transition point when all my big consulting gigs were wrapping up, but I was not clear what my next “career move” would be. I was only certain that I was being called back to Hawaiʻi. And I had a profound moment of reinforcement of the connection between place and purpose as soon as I landed, as I shared in an earlier essay on “calling” or “personal mission.”
I had thought and read extensively about finding work that fulfilled a life purpose because I was trying to make meaning of my personal journey in the 1990s, the period about which I began writing this memoir.1 Articulating my conclusions to others in a grounded way became critical as I began to coach people and organizations in the early 2000s. How could I explain the value in a journey that had circled from working on Wall Street through a long pilgrimage to come back to consulting with only a felt sense - but not an articulation - of my own purpose or personal legend? I had the stories, many many teaching stories, but I needed to wrap them up neatly and tie a bow on the package. A colleague and I had created a company that was intended to guide executives in self-discovery, match them with meaningful, purpose-driven careers, and make sure they had the leadership and management skills to succeed. I needed to give my own journey credibility for which I could get paid!
Humans and animals alike long for connection, and can benefit from diversity in our herds.
During this time I continued to explore the idea of life purpose and contribution in conversation with a couple of diverse “herds.” The first herd, the one that had I had gathered or encountered during my recent journeys, was definitely eclectic. In contrast, I had the executives in the Wall Street Dialogues I was facilitating, leaders whose view of themselves and their world had been profoundly shaken by their experiences on September 11, 2001 and during the months that followed. One herd was all about intuition, following the omens, discovering oneʻs life purpose through the journey. The other herd, men and women, privileged backgrounds and hardscrabble rises, all had based their careers on an unquestioned assumption that their goal was individual achievement and success by standards of accumulating wealth and power, only to have all their ideas about leadership and value come tumbling down with the Twin Towers.
I knew the experiences I shared with the two herds were related, and that my own purpose was in that area where the two circles of the Venn diagram overlapped. The one conclusion that was consistent across my reading and discussion, was that oneʻs life purpose or vocation is defined in relationship with others, as opposed to oneʻs innate talents, learned skills, strengths and yearnings - the only things most vocational counselors or HR departments would focus on. During my first experience with Equine Guided Education Ariana explained how humans, horses and dogs share the same social system. Our co-evolution as species was based upon ways in which our collaboration was mutually beneficial. There appeared to be a biological basis for humanʻs powerful need for connection, for our inclination to define our place in a larger scheme of things.
My good friend and mentor The Reverend Fred Burnham, whom my readers met in my recollections of September 11th, invited me to design and lead the ongoing Trinity Wall Street Dialogues out of our shared interest in the implications of the “new sciences” like quantum physics to chaos theory versus the Newtonian “old sciences.” The fundamental distinction we saw as valuable to everyday life, to bridging the Church and Wall Street, was in a relational perspective rather than an atomistic perspective. Either/or changes to both/and. Pattern and new creation are emergent as natural processes - phenomenon do not necessarily wind down due to entropy. Trinity Wall Street Dialogues seemed to be an opportunity to explore many topics in the intersection of my personal Venn Diagram that were of importance to both church and business, from diversity and inclusion to the ramifications of the tech revolution.
For Fred, the distinction was epistemological - meaning we were not just exploring different ways of thinking. We were doing something more fundamental - accepting as valid and applicable different assumptions about how we know what we know or how we discern what is true. The experiences I had during pilgrimage journey reinforced things I “knew to be true” even if my training as an economist at an engineering university would have said they were empirically unprovable. In a similar way, the new sciences provided explanations for things that seemed to be true even though the old rational framework said that was impossible. Light is both a particle and a wave. Subatomic particles can be two places at once. It all depends on the viewerʻs perspective.
In our conversations about careers and life purpose, Fred introduced me to a couple of theologians who wrote powerfully on the topic of vocation. Parker Palmerʻs formulation is “Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.” Frederick Buechner put it this way: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
I found similar ideas in other teachings. But whereas in the Western, Christian world it seemed it was up to me singular to discover my calling, listening for vocation seemed to be a collective responsibility in other cultures. One fan and colleague of my mentor Velvalee was a spiritual teacher named Malidoma Patrice Somé. Born in West Africa in a Dagara community, he explained how tribal elders “listen” for a childʻs name while the child is still in utero - conferring a name that describes the contribution that child will make to the community. In other words, each child is born with its inherent worth already acknowledged, its place in the herd known to it and to the other members of its village/herd.
Malidoma Somé’s name means “friend of the enemy/stranger.” He saw his destiny as being expressed through his choice to live and teach in the United States. The meaning of his name was resonant for me, as it seemed through many years and different career choices, my essential reason for being had something to do with bridging between “enemy” -seemingly mutually contradictory - ways of thinking, seeing, being in the world. If this was my vocation, it had taken and continued to take diverse forms. It was reassuring to me to think that I might just be on track after all.
In our complex modern world, the essential expression of your divinely given mode of contribution can take a single clear course, or over time take many forms. It may or may not always be seen and valued publicly. But the takeaway is that your life purpose or calling or vocation only and always exists in relationship to others, to a herd.
When I read about the apparent epidemic of loneliness - or when I hear about young people who prefer to connect virtually rather than in actual face-to-face encounters - I feel unbearably sad. Maybe this is a post-pandemic, letʻs meet by Zoom, malady and maybe the pandemic just exacerbated it. It puzzles me because one way or another each of us does contribute to the collective. Your contribution may be through your professional life. It may be through all those essential forms of labor that are not valued in modern society as “professional" and therefore as not as worthy. It may be in receiving what others need and want to contribute. But I know you contribute. And contribution, looking in anotherʻs eyes or laboring side by side, this is where we feel connected and valued.
Really letʻs stop blaming a coronavirus. Or “technology.” When my sadness turns to anger I think this: that the danger is in the disconnection and loneliness created by individualistic societal structures where neither individuals nor the collective thrive. There is an alternative. We have seen that in indigenous thinking, as in a horse herd, every member of the collective has value. Every job and position is essential. Every member of the herd deserves to be protected and provided for. This is what is natural. Why else would we all have this inborn need to belong, this inborn desire to contribute?
To wrap up, I would love to hear your thoughts on how do we listen for vocation? How do we find place and purpose?
And stay tuned for thoughts about this question: How do we move from listening to begin to make tentative offers, in order to find out which offers have value and will be accepted by the herd as our commitments to them?
".....one way or another each of us does contribute to the collective." True dat!