Shock of the New

In May of this year, I left Austin, Texas and my job as a professor of performance and women’s studies at the University of Texas, to move to Albuquerque. As a novelist and playwright who had spent over thirty years in higher education, I decided that if I was going to fulfill my dream of focusing more fully on writing and coaching others on their creativity and writing, the time was now. The surprises of the move have all been on the upside, including how many other people I’ve met here who, like me, are wishing to re-create their lives and careers. I’ve particularly met many women who have chosen Albuquerque as a place to start a new phase of their lives; for some, one with a deeper component of spiritual practice, or a more intense relationship with landscape and the environment; others have sought out Albuquerque as a place to jumpstart their creativity, whether in their careers or as artists.

Change has much allure, but it’s seldom easy; we often describe it as making a leap or falling off a cliff. I reference the feeling of falling into change in the opening of my first novel, The Fool’s Journey, “One day, dreaming of change, we jump out of bed and dive headfirst into the shock of the new.’
Making the leap myself “into the shock of the new” caused me to reflect on our need, and our resistance, to life changes. The fact is that as we develop our first adulthood, we acquire mastery of various kinds: we learn pragmatic and creative skills, develop a career or succeed in a job; if we’re young we develop an independent adult life apart from our parents and families, we perhaps get married and have children of our own. The choosing and the making of that initial path are creative acts, requiring us to use many aspects of ourselves.

Developing a personal or career path takes us through initiation, when we take risks and move deeper into ourselves. Initiatory events are those that define who we are, allow us to come into our power, or strip everything away until all that is left is the essential self. We experience initiation when we go to college or start out on our career path, for example, or risk physical well being to meet a physical challenge, or trust in another person in the act of marriage. I found that in my twenties teaching for the first few years required a leap of faith, as did developing a series of solo performances in my forties that I toured throughout the country.

In time, whatever path we’ve chosen becomes routine. No matter how exciting initially, it’s impossible to live forever in the heightened state of initiation. And so we pass through many initiations in the course of our lives: for the new place we find cannot stay new. In time, as in a romantic relationship where excitement gradually gives way to the everyday, the breakthrough takes on the trappings of the habitual. If we’re in midlife, we’ve most likely forgotton, as the Jungian psychologist James Hollis says, “the freedom, the wonderful naivete, the joy even, of life lived freshly.”
We resist change, even when we need it most, because it’s scary. It’s not comfortable to abandon the status quo, it’s often financially risky, for example, or we fear we won’t be prepared. While the inner voice tells us to try something new, the harsh critic we all carry around in our heads tells us to stick with what is proven and familiar.

Giving up my profession as a professor, something I knew how to do and I’d been successful doing, felt very risky. Yet I felt like I was stagnating after three decades doing it: I didn’t have enough time for writing novels and other creative projects, I wanted to work with a different, adult population, and I wanted to move to a more open landscape.

As a writer and someone who works with people to enhance their creativity, I’m interested in how we regain our sense of life as an adventure, the satisfaction that comes of using the parts of us that may have become rusty from disuse. In fairy tales, there are frequently three brothers or three sisters: it is always the youngest, the least experienced, the least invested in “the way things have always been done,” who makes a breakthrough. When the times call for change, we need to engage this youngest part of ourselves––this part, not invested in the status quo, will find creative solutions because it isn’t jaded or cynical but willing to go down the new path and try something that hasn’t been tried before.

It’s essential when encouraging this vital part of ourselves to silence the inner critic. This critic––the older brother in the fairy tale––resides in our ego, our conscious being. While the ego helps us to survive, allowing us to act and project authority in the world, it also, like the older brother, bullies the nascent parts of ourselves that are trying to emerge. When we want to do something new––start a new draft of a book or project, learn a new sport, develop a new part of ourselves––we must give ourselves permission to be beginners. That permission allows us to make mistakes, experiment, and rediscover our lost vitality through play. Great gifts often come from initial fumbles when we try something for the first time. Relinquishing the inner perfectionist is essential to this phase of renewal.

As I work with clients individually and in groups, I encourage people to take risks, explore possibilities, and allow themselves to be initiates. The goal is to make the learning process a creative act by providing a safe place where participants can take a leap into the unknown and land in a place of renewal.

This brings me to the notion of vocation as opposed to career. Our vocation is our passion, what we love to do; the thing or things that resonate deeply with our authentic selves. Often in life we leave behind something of this authentic self to forge an independent life, to be successful. We may choose a career because it has chosen us or because favorable events led us that way. As a noun, the word career indicates an occupation undertaken for a significant time, one with opportunities for progress. As a verb, career means to move swiftly and in an uncontrolled way in a specific direction, as in ‘a car careered across the road and went through a hedge.’ A career can serve one’s vocation or it can obscure one’s vocation: sometimes we leave a career because we feel we have trod a path for a long time and have covered the path repeated times. We long for rediscovery. I think when this happens we have forgotten how to be a beginner, how to be an apprentice. If we retain the innocence of learners, of initiates, we will always reinvent ourselves, which is one way of saying we continue to discover the selves that have always been there.

We all have the power to choose a more creative, engaged life. Or as Joseph Campbell would say: "We must be willing to get rid of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us."

You can contact me at lynn(at)lynncmiller(dot)com