Pebbles and Breadcrumbs

In the classic fairy tale, Hansel and Gretel are led deep into the forest by their father, a woodcutter. Their selfish stepmother wanting to rid the home of children, so she and their father would have enough food in a time of personal famine.

Initially, the two overhear their stepmother and father making plans to take them into the forest and leave them. Hansel goes out at night and gathers white pebbles to mark the path back home. When they are left deep in the forest, Hansel and Gretel follow the pebbles back home. Their father delighted to see them make it home. The stepmother, on the other hand, is furious.

She prevails upon her husband to take them back into the forest and leave them. This time, she locks the children's bedroom door, so they are unable to gather pebbles during the night.

Instead, when Hansel and Gretel are led into the forest, Hansel leaves breadcrumbs from a slice of bread he had taken. Unknown to him, though, birds eat the crumbs as they head deeper and deeper into the forest. When their father leaves them in the woods, they are lost.

They discover a house made of gingerbread and candy. They are invited inside by a very old woman only to discover, belatedly, that she is a witch. By the time they discover that, it is too late for them. They are held captive until Gretel out tricks her and they escape.

Normally, this is considered a type of coming-of-age tale. A children's or young adult tale. But what if it has application for adults as well.

We are led into the wilderness of adulthood to fend for ourselves only to discover we have been left alone. The wilderness is a maze of figuring out how to survive. Sometimes that wilderness is more easily navigated. Other times we find ourselves feeling captured and working for the proverbial witch. Yet, other times we find ourselves stuck in the forest subsisting in less than ideal conditions.

Just as Hansel and Gretel being aided by the swan across the lake, we may at some point find ourselves being aided by supernatural beings. It certainly may seem that way when we are led out of what feels like captivity to work that is fulfilling and satisfying.

I have felt like Hansel and Gretel throughout different points of my career, feeling lost in the wilderness not knowing which path to take, being in a career that satisfied my needs like the candy in the gingerbread house, and feeling like I'm imprisoned in the witches cage. And, yet, I've somehow come to the point where I feel like my journey is being aided by supernatural beings.

Along the way, I've traveled down many paths that haven't led home. Paths that included time as a office supplies salesperson, a database administrator, a senior accountant, and as a financial analyst. None of them led me to the witch's cauldron but I often felt as if I were in a foreign land and all I wanted was to head home.

Even since being more intentionally on the path to figuring out my individual purpose I've tried various paths as a paper mache artist, a photographer, and a graphic designer. It is only recently since I have found my way to helping businesses navigate their own path in the world that I have begun to feel like I am headed into home territory.

I may not be completely home yet, but at least the territory looks familiar and comfortable. It has been a long journey with many twists and turns, and in no way is it time for me to rest. Actually, now that I am in home territory, I need to settle in and get to work clearing off land that has become overgrown or left fallow. It will take some work to see the fruits of my labors, but I look forward to a rich bounty.

Seeking the Meaning of Life

After I first encountered the threshold that would take me into the next adventure of my life, I had just come back from being out on extended sick leave due to whooping cough. That, to say the least, was a nasty fight!

The good thing is that being out sick like I was I had time to do a lot of thinking. One of the things I had been thinking about for a long time was what was I to do with my life. I honestly felt like my life was being directed at this point. For some reason, I needed to get a disease that would frequently have me choking for breath and coughing so hard that I would lose consciousness.

My future was something I thought about while I was out on sick leave. I felt a strong sense that change was imminent. I just didn't know what change looked like.
Dealing with a serious illness has a tendency to make one think about life and what it all means. In my religion, it is generally accepted that the purpose of life is to be proven worthy of returning to live with God. I'm good with that in the macro sense. What I really wanted to know is at the micro level. What is my life purpose?

I guess one of the things I was looking for was meaning in the experiences I had had in life. I have always felt that there is something more than surface level of survival and existence. More than providing for my family and watching them grow. More than developing skills and abilities. More than filling out a resume of accomplishments.

Stephen R. Covey wrote of leaving a legacy. What was my legacy to be?

That question has often been on my mind—almost to the point of obsession. I believe that one of the reasons I struggled so much at the work I was doing was that I felt so out of tune with whatever that purpose was. I wasn't fulfilling my unknown purpose, so I didn't feel fulfilled. I didn't feel satisfied with the life I was living. In fact, I felt quite the opposite.

I felt an overwhelming feeling of incongruency—like I was on one path but was meant to be on another. It's like being lost in the airport. I found I was in the wrong terminal and my plane was leaving soon. I knew I needed to get to the right gate to get on that airplane, but I didn't even know where that gate was.

My time at the job where I had been when I got whooping cough lasted a few more months before layoffs began to happen in the company, and I was laid off.

Since then, I have been on a mission to figure out my purpose in life. And, not in some general purpose of the word but what was my individual purpose? What would it take for me to feel like my life to have purpose?

I became unwilling to put that on hold while I got back to the life I had established. What had been comfortable became anything but.

My family and my faith have remained constants in my life. But I knew that if I were to find satisfaction, I knew I needed to do more than put food on the table and a roof over our heads.

I knew there would be no easy answers. Plumbing the depths of one's soul is an awful lot of work! And can be incredibly confronting!

But I began to get signs that I was on the right path. A kind of breadcrumbs of the soul.

Life Lessons Learned

My father passed away nearly a year and a half ago. Hardly a day passes that I don't think of him and the legacy he left. Although he left little in the way of worldly goods, he did leave behind a legacy of family, beauty and God.

In some ways my life has mirrored Dad's. He put a lot of time, energy and money into education, which is really kind of amazing considering the start he got in life.

You see Dad's life began with the Great Depression. Like many parents they struggled to provide for the family. My dad's parents divorced shortly after Dad was born. His mother remarried when Dad was six.

Due to the struggles of the Depression, Dad's family moved  from state to state around the country. As a result, he was never in one place long enough to get a strong education. When he graduated from high school, he told us he was barely able to read.

After high school, he joined the Navy during the Korean War. Reading was a primary activity  for him during long periods aboard ship as it traveled the world. Naturally, his reading ability improved dramatically.

Upon returning from the war, Dad headed to college on a GI Bill where he studied history and subsequently earned his teacher's certificate. He taught grade school for a number of years in a small town on the coast of Oregon. After a while, though, he came to the conclusion that teaching in the school system was not a good fit for him. So we moved inland to Springfield, where Dad studied accounting during much of my teenage years.

He finished his studies at the same time I finished high school. He moved with my mom and sister to Seattle where he had taken an accounting job. My younger brother and I stayed behind in Oregon. My younger brother finished his senior year of high school, and I started at the community college in the area.

The main point to all this is that Dad pursued education through all the time I knew him. Even after he moved to Seattle, after about five years he was back in school taking art classes whenever he could. Often taking classes at the University of Washington.

It was when Dad started taking art classes and starting to reignite his passion for capturing the beauty in the world that he seemed to come to life. Throughout my childhood, Dad was often busy studying or working. We didn't spend much time together, and, unfortunately, we didn't have much of a relationship at that time.

After he started pursuing art as a passion, his life began to spring up within him. He began to open up to us kids and we started to see light in his eyes and excitement and passion in the work he was doing. I am grateful for the change of life that art brought to my dad and the relationship it opened up for us.

I remember frequently going out with Dad. One simple incident in particular stands out in my mind. We had stopped our walk along the boardwalk bordering the Puget Sound near his home. He began to describe the light and the shadows he found in the evening sky. With his developing artistic eye, he was able to see things that I wasn't. He saw depth and color that I had taken for granted.

My own artistic vision didn't change at that time, but my appreciation for Dad did. I began to see my Dad as an artist. He was able to see the world around us through the eyes of an artist. I had studied, among other things, art history in college, so I knew many of the great painters and sculptors since the Renaissance. I recognized art that stirred my soul, but I didn't see the world through the eyes of an artist.

Somehow that experience has stuck with me.

As I went through my career, I kept looking for a similar role that would help me see the world anew. Something that I felt was mine. Until recently, I struggled like Dad did before he found his passion for art. I have always made more money than Dad did but it wasn't fulfilling. I was good at what I did, but I never felt alive doing it. It was a means to an end.

I am grateful for the legacy my father left me of his love of art. Art is not only rewarding on its own, but I believe Dad's passion for art opened something in me that made me long for finding my own way in life.

More on that later.

Call to Adventure

Joseph Campbell in his epic The Hero with a Thousand Faces lays out what he called the monomyth. Almost all fiction follows a similar story arc--from the story of Jesus' ministry in the New Testament to the journey of Luke Skywalker through the Star Wars saga.

There are basically four stages of the arc. We start out with the hero in his known world with life as status quo. Jesus grows up in Nazareth the son of a carpenter. Luke grows up on Tatooine with his uncle and aunt.

Then comes the call to adventure. In the case of Jesus, he is baptized by John, the heavens open and a voice declares,  "This is my beloved son. in whom I am well pleased." (KJV Matthew 3:16) A new reality begins for Jesus. No longer is he simply a carpenter from Nazareth.

Luke's uncle and aunt are killed, and he is left alone in the wilderness. Obi-wan Kenobi enters his life and he is called upon a quest to overcome the Empire.

In both cases, the two could conceivably abandon the call and stay in familiar territory. Of course, neither do and the adventure begins. On their new adventure, they encounter all kinds of challenges, tasks and opportunities. 

They are assisted by others along the way: Jesus with his twelve disciples; Luke with the help of Han Solo, Princess Leia, Obi-wan and the rest of the resistance.

Ultimately, Jesus goes on to become the Savior of the world. Luke goes on to defeat the empire.

In the end, they cross over into a new world.

Joseph Campbell calls this story structure the monomyth because the basic arc is found in most stories throughout time. From adventure tales to romance. And from short stories to epic series.

Each of us, in turn,  is called upon to embark upon our own adventure. We have the choice to make of staying in our familiar territory or entering an unknown world with unknown challenges where, ultimately, we may lose the life we once knew. 

In a way, our adventure can be seen as an internal struggle. At least, the battle that decides if we stay or if we go on the adventure happens within the mind of the character--or within us. In most fictional stories, the choice seems almost inevitable. 

The Clash's song Should I Stay or Should I Go puts it well:  "If I go there will be trouble. And if I stay there will be double."

In our own lives, though, the choice isn't so clear. To embark upon our own adventure, we need to leave our comfortable existence behind. Frequently, this means calling into question the world we have accepted as being the real world. The way things should be. The call to adventure--on the other hand--may only be a weak glimpse into the way things could be. In life, there are no guarantees. If we stay, we believe we are more likely to enjoy what we have become accustomed to. The familiar routines. The accepted business practices. The established reputation.

After all, it is the known world. The world we have come to accept as our own.

But as in the Clash song, there will be trouble if we stay.

For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.’ - John Greenleaf Whittier, Maud Miller

Those missed opportunities may simply be things we wish we could have done--a regret. But they could also be a better business, more satisfaction and fulfillment, more adventure. Or the adventure may be making the necessary changes that will save an audience, a neighborhood, a community, or the world. 

Ultimately, the choice to embark upon our own adventure is up to us.

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Not Me or Living Life as a Counterfeit

I came across a passage this morning in Seth Godin’s The Icarus Deception about three ways artists engage with their audience. The first way, is that they really don’t. They make their art and aren’t concerned about a connection. The second way is for the artist to consider her work incomplete unless he makes a genuine connection with the work she produces and the audience that gets it.

The third, and perhaps most tragic way, is for the artist to be more concerned about meeting the cries of the market instead of creating art. "Some [artists] will eagerly listen to every criticism and work to water down the art to pander to the largest possible audience. For this person, market share means more than art does. And so we see old Elvis become a Las Vegas parody and old Judy Garland hit bottom onstage." (Godin, 202)

In my previous post I wrote about how my work experience ended with an emotional crisis. It has been difficult to put into words or find a story that mirrors how I was feeling. After all, I did have a job that paid me well with really good benefits. I was doing work that I was good at and was heralded as being Mr. Excel and the IT guy within the department. I could meet almost any technical challenge that was sent my way. Yet, I was bored out of my mind and becoming increasingly disillusioned.

I should have been happy. But I wasn’t.

As I’ve worked through the emotional crisis that nearly took my life, I have come to strongly believe that the source of my problem was that I was living in disharmony with my inner self. For many people, that is not a big deal. I have had a number of trusted associates confide in me that they were seldom satisfied or fulfilled in their jobs. They were good at what they did but they, too, were disillusioned by the way in which they had to do it. But, they persevered in order to provide for their families. 

As the days, months and years slipped by in the work I was doing I kept telling myself that I needed to set aside the angst I was feeling with regards to my work. After all, I had a family to provide for and a mortgage to pay. (Is it any coincidence that mortgage is Latin for death (mort) pledge (gage) ;-) ? )

So I kept my head down and plugged on, and like many of my coworkers, worked for the weekend and an early retirement twenty+ years away.

In an age when positive thinking is heralded as the cure for everything from depression to cancer, I tried swallowing the proverbial happy pill and kept on a perpetual happy face. Until I couldn’t muster the strength to do that any longer.

(In an ironic twist of fate,  when I returned from my leave for whooping cough I was written up, in part, for not smiling enough. Part of the ensuing employment probation was that I would maintain a cheerful demeanor. In the accounting department…. Really?)

I had worked my life for a paycheck regularly advancing up the corporate ladder in order to get a bigger and bigger paycheck.

The irony being that I have since discovered that money isn’t very important to me. Yet in an arena in which salary is valued more highly than job satisfaction and self fulfillment, it was the measuring stick by which I evaluated whether or not I was being successful. As there are always others making more money, I didn’t feel I was being hugely successful on that front either. 

Yet, if everybody else seems to be able to navigate life working a job that didn’t provide a lot of fulfillment, why is that I had such a crisis? I should have been able to brush it off and move on. Right?

I couldn’t, though. Even the thought of going back to that type of life, even with all its security, ties my stomach in knots. 

How do I reconcile my experience with everybody around me who continue to plod along? 

A light went on when I came across the short passage in Godin’s book. Did I encounter the same dilemma that Elvis encountered along his trajectory from the hills of Tennessee to the stages of Las Vegas?

In Las Vegas, Elvis was at what would have seemed to the casual bystander the height of his career. He was making $100,000 a week, and given a $6,000 daily credit in the casino—but he didn’t play nodding to his Southern Baptist upbringing.

He was bringing in enough money to buy Rolexes, Cadillacs and houses for numerous friends. His shows changed the city from a mafia-controlled environment to that of big business.

Yet, he was miserable. 

Elvis had just ended a ten-year engagement with Hollywood where he was making up to three movies a year. But he felt no sense of artistry. The King of Rock and Roll had been brought to feel like a singing monkey on display to perform but not free to be himself. 

He said of Hollywood, “I was bored with movies, bored with the people, and bored with my life. I felt I’d sold my soul to the Devil.”

Heading to Las Vegas, he thought he had found a new lease on life. “I look on today as the day I get back to doing the work that God put me on Earth to do.”

But then like a sow returning to the mire, Elvis signed a seven-year contract where he would be doing two shows a night, for four weeks, twice a year.

The money was good. The fame was good. And he was a popular man among the ladies. But, he was miserable. 

Trying to find solace in that which doesn’t satisfy, he filled himself with food (needing to get a new rhinestone suit each time he performed), drugs, and lavishing generous gifts on family and friends. 

The popular singer Tom Jones recalled, “He loved being Elvis Presley, There was no doubt about that. He loved it when he was great and who could blame him? But then I think he started to dislike himself. He lost his desire to be Elvis Presley.”

Lost his desire to be Elvis Presley. Or more accurately, lost his desire to be the counterfeit Elvis that Hollywood and Las Vegas propped up.

Although, Elvis’ story is much more sensational than mine. I can relate to living a counterfeit life. Prior to my emotional crisis, I had been living the life I was “supposed” to live. Go to college, graduate school, get a good job, make good money, pay the mortgage, provide for the family and churn out work. Day after day after day.

Elvis lost the will to continue on because he had given up his mastery. He had lost the dream and the artistry of creating something new and vital. He stopped being who he was and accepted his role as a forfeit. 

And, ultimately, he paid the price.

While Elvis did exhibit artistry and mastery early in his career, I had never felt that I had found my own voice. Instead I had pursued the life that was held up as the ideal. And I, too, pursued and tried to stay true to that illusion. Until I couldn’t any longer.

Since that day of crisis, I have been on a crusade, a pilgrimage to find my own artistry and mastery. I am still very much on the path, but I feel as if I am entering a native land that I left long ago.

How It Began

The idea for Center Based Marketing has come over a lifetime of attempting to find work that resonates with my ideals. My personality is such that I am uncomfortable doing something without feeling a connection to what I am doing.

I don’t have any statistics to indicate if this is common or uncommon. I do know that the places where I’ve worked most people tended to be content with doing their job and getting a paycheck. For me, there has always been some discontent… a nagging feeling that something was amiss. 

I didn’t really become aware of how much discomfort there was in fighting against that nagging feeling until it came to a head and I slipped into a terrible fight with major depression. 

Even after I took a couple months off in order to get through the depression, I didn’t feel like I had any answers as to how to proceed. In essence, it felt like I was putting a band-aid on it and going back to work. The same work, at the same place, with the same people. The only difference was I was now taking medication and seeing a psychiatrist regularly. Nothing underlying really changed.

After all, that is the way it is. Right? Put on your name tag, paste on a smile and head back to work. 

The only problem is that didn’t take care of the underlying problem.

After I went back to work, I did have a shift in my job responsibilities to the point that I was doing more programming and development tasks rather than simply focusing on accounting and analysis. My role was that of a financial analyst. With the new changes, I shifted more into a business analyst position. 

I enjoyed the work more, but I still didn’t feel fulfilled….not a part of the benefit package. ;-) The job had all the typical benefits that come with a good job—nearly 4 weeks of vacation plus another 10 days of holidays, 401K matching, health insurance, eye insurance, etc. etc.

Looking at the number of people who are dissatisfied with their job, it seems most jobs don’t come with job satisfaction included in the benefit package. I’m being facetious here but when we look at a job we tend to only look at the numbers related to it (salary, weeks vacation, 401K matching, etc). 

Through the course of my career, I have taken quite a number of personality profiles in order to understand myself better. They would all hint at something. [Need more here]. I thought I was doing something that I cared about it. I know I was doing something I was good at and was being adequately compensated for. But there was something missing. 

One of the things that attracted me to the job I took was that the company’s mission was to “enable it’s customers to make the world healthier, cleaner, and safer.” That sounded like a good cause and one that I could get behind. 

I’ve always been an environmentalist and an idealist. Making the world healthier, cleaner and safer sounded like something good to get behind. And I can’t really deny that the company’s efforts did lead to the world becoming better. 

For whatever reason, it did not fulfill me, though. 

After a couple more years of work with the new responsibilities and an increasing sense that something was wrong, I ended up constricting whooping cough. I was miserably sick. Passing out on the floor from coughing so hard. Naturally, I couldn’t work in that state of health, so I left again for a few weeks on short-term disability in order to recover. Doctors orders and all.

When I went back to work, it was evident from the moment I stepped into the department that I wasn’t welcome there. I had crossed whatever threshold and there was no opportunity to turn back. HR was called in and I had a slew of charges filed against me. Some of them were legitimate. Others, well…

I immediately fell into the worst depression I had ever been in. I had just fought for my life with whooping cough, taking significant amounts of hydrocodone, and fighting frequently for what seemed like my last breath. At times, it seemed like my life was passing before my eyes. 

And here I was, back at work, and I was being handed my life in a basket. It was more than I could take, and I snapped. But I did it on personal time, so I was back at work the next day as if nothing had happened. Only a couple people know how close it really came.

Internally, though, something had snapped and I had crossed my own threshold of no return. I didn’t know where my life was headed but I knew something was about to change.

And this time, instead of looking outside for job (and life) satisfaction, I began to look within. I didn’t really know what that meant. To be honest, I probably didn’t even know I was doing it.