A phoenix rises from the ashes
After a few years of a reclusive peace, a new type of fervor is born 🔥🔥🔥
When I was young, dumb, and hungry, I had big hopes and dreams. A few years ago, I stumbled upon an old piece of paper upon which my younger self wrote down a list of lofty goals, which included a salary goal that I still haven’t quite achieved.
I was a bit (ok, very) insufferable back then. I had this sickening combination of optimism, naivety around the possibility of everything, and this idealistic belief that the system rewarded people deservedly who dared to dream and made it a reality.
But that was genuine for me. Maybe other than the list of goals1. I had a natural fire within me that drove me to action, even if I didn’t really know where I was going or why.
It took me up my first mountain. The one that you climb just because you want to find out whether you can do it. Questions of “why?” matter a lot less at this point. There’s so many paths in life, so why not this one? It looks as good as any other. And sometimes the one that everyone else wants to climb becomes desirable, because that’s the one where you want to see if you’ve got what it takes. I chose consulting.
But even on that singular ascent, the mountain range has its way of finding its own trails for each person. For some, the shiny object might be to see how much money they could make, so they pick the paths that lead to that. For others, it’s about whether they can win against all the competition. Or it might be a loftier impact or virtue that appeals to you. And so on.
What tends to happen is the paths wean away. Some choose you, and you choose some. And at some point, you’ve truly carved your own life path. While you may have started off the ascent with a large batch of peers, eventually you or the expansive mountain range whittles that down until you’re mostly alone. You still encounter other hikers at various intersections, but they have their own path to take, and you have yours.
In the moments you realise you’re alone, your mind wanders and you wonder. How did I get here? What if I took that other route? Was this the plan all along? Will the summit be worth it?
Some of us are pleased with the path they’re taking. Others feel like they’ve gone so far already, so they should keep going.
Cremation and finding peace
But one day, I chose to hike back down. I felt like a hiker who took a wrong turn at some point.
I checked out of a decade long path through consulting and tech startups, working for some and building some of my own. I went back to a job that needed none of it — teaching at university.
Without realising it, I’d already found my summit. There was nothing that I wanted to chase anymore. The path I took was beautiful. I took every turn that lit up my curiosity. But when I looked across the mountain range from my vantage point, rather than seeing hope like I usually did, I felt a sense of weariness. The possibilities seemed dimmer. I felt like I’d been there and done that. Even if not that exact path or specific summit, it all started to feel a bit like one and the same.
Instead, I found a deep and profound sense of peace in teaching. Climbing the mountain was merely a replacement for finding something that filled me up every day, without requiring any sense of progress. I saw firsthand how the mountain could take away the hope and possibility of progress from me, but if I found a crevice where I was happy without any of that, then nothing could take that from me.
I’m not suggesting that I wouldn’t have climbed the mountain in the first place though. In fact, I’m sure if I chose teaching as my initial path, it would have just as easily become my first mountain.
When I rejoined the university, it wasn’t a glorious utopia or dream job like you might imagine living your best life is supposed to be like. It was like any other work environment. There are politics. There are personalities. There are constraints. My peers worry about their career prospects, and what changes in their role mean for them.
Instead of a sanctuary, it was more like a zoo.
It was only from my initial ascent that I was able to enter the zoo with a sense of calm. I wasn’t here for the politics. I wasn’t here for the career progression. I was here to do one thing. Teach. Do it extremely well. Then go back home, and do it again tomorrow.
I had this duality of apathy and purpose. I insulated myself from the demands of the world around me (the university, academia, the whole system). And I hyper-focused on what truly mattered to me, the students.2
Progression and politics didn’t matter to me. I knew why I was there, and I was knocking that out of the park (even if it meant ignoring the ladder that everyone else was focused on). But that was only possible because I had done all of the climbing elsewhere. I’d literally taken more than a 50% pay cut to go back to teaching. Even a promotion to the very top (which would take at least a decade) in this system would not match what I was getting. Clearly, none of that mattered to me.
So that’s how I found my peace. I was a recluse who interacted as little as possible with the system around me. I just showed up to my domain (my classes) and mastered it with the best of my abilities. Each time as fulfilling as the last. Each time burying a little more of my past self who climbed to stay happy. I no longer needed to feel progress to feel fulfilled. I had everything I needed here.
And I lived happily ever after…
A rise from the ashes
Something about chilling out for the rest of my life didn’t sit right with lots of people around me. My first conversation with my new line manager at university started with “Why?” and I had many close friends tell me that something will surely come next.
An inner indignant child kind of wanted to prove them wrong. And look, I genuinely am perfectly happy. A few weeks after returning to teaching — well before I had decided I was going to make this any more than a brief pitstop rest in my life — my wife pointed out how much happier, lighter, and freer I seemed. Before this, I was already a fairly happy-go-lucky person, but now I had this kind of low-key contentment that burned slow and long. Unlike the flames of excitement that wither away eventually, this feels like a strong and determined fire that would never waver.
I genuinely wondered if I was the happiest person I knew.
Yet my friends were also kind of right too.
Slowly, I started to build interest in the university meetings that I mostly chose to withdraw from. First, I just listened if I had to be there. Mostly, it would just validate my dismissiveness about the university system. The university is a slow moving, archaic system that reveres a type of tradition that I don’t really care for.
But I reluctantly went along to more, sometimes out of mere curiosity just to see what I could learn about how everyone else perceives the system. Sometimes it was more of the same, but each time I slowly built a richer picture of the nuances of the system I had joined.
For instance, I started to appreciate the entrepreneurship that was required of the best researchers in any field. I started to learn more about how the university I joined was relatively more federated than some of its competitors who were a lot more centralised — appreciating the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches. The recently hired education-focused roles (which I was a part of) were clearly still an experiment that was lacking in clarity, but maybe that was also an opportunity?
It felt like it happened overnight, but I suddenly wanted to know, feel, and do more within the system around me.
What was true is still true, but now with more. The classroom was still my domain, and I would continue to exercise mastery of it. But now I felt like I could see all the constraints (real or imagined) around it much more clearly. I started to wonder, and ask of the others around me: “Could we do this? How else could we make this better?”
I don’t really think my friends would have guessed this for me. They probably thought I was going back into the business world someday, and this still isn’t the ending they’re imagining.
But they were certainly right about something: I have a capacity and inherent hunger to shape and mould the world around me.
And I will use it. Not just in the classroom, but around it on the systems that affect it. Even if that means I have to interact with the politics and the personalities I originally wanted to retreat from.
Because in my earlier journey of finding peace, a shadow side of me also took the opportunity to cling onto something that masqueraded as peace: retreating and withdrawing from the real world that scared me. It was scary because I’d rather live in the hypothetical. If I never tried, no one would ever know how good I could be. And since I had already found peace, I never needed to find out how “good” I was anyway!
The pin dropped.
Before this, being at peace meant to me that it doesn’t really matter, so I didn’t need to show up and push.
But if it doesn’t matter, I could also just show up, give it my all, and if it fails, it doesn’t matter!
A sleeping giant was reawakened again. Not only was I free from expectation or progress (something I had attained earlier, when I started teaching), but now I was also equally free to playfully try to push the boundaries.
Not for the sake of progress, but for the sake of itself.
It was okay to try. I didn’t need to kill that part of me. 🐦🔥
Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed it. This is one of my longer ones. It’s not a planned change in style, it’s just what I wanted to write this time.
I rebranded by the way. I used to have a more loose and lackadaisical framing, where I gave myself the permission to write about anything. I still will write about anything. But I’ve realised that everything I write about gravitates around this one thing: that we should play even over trying to perform our best (and if we start with play, we’re likely to get both in the process!)
My collection of articles is now getting old enough that I’ve had thoughts about re-writing certain posts already. I’ll try not to (at most I’ll “remaster” some as new ones). But that feels like a type of achievement to realise that it’s gone for that long now.
It was weird to discover that list of goals, because I have almost always turned my nose up at explicit goal setting. I guess I was experimenting and learning my eventual position that goals are contrived and lagging markers of desire.
While one model of success is to doggedly hit your stated goals, this is prone to a kind of misalignment problem. I’ve found that the moment you act upon a goal, you generate new information, which makes you learn more about your goal, and in many cases, why your goal does not truly represent your desires. A truer model of success for me is one where people feel out what they desire and iteratively walk towards it, maybe tweaking or completely changing the direction on the way, only discovering its fullness on the way there.
(Maybe I should write more on this…)
This became crystal clear to me after I recently participated in a research interview about the challenges faced by education focused staff at university.
I was motivated to participate because I felt this profound sense of “otherness” (which, to be clear, I’m merely bemused rather than hurt by) when watching what felt like a chorus of anxieties about their roles and requirements in staff meetings, while I felt this deep sense of peace and satisfaction with what I was here to do.
When I was asked by the researcher how valued I felt by the various layers of the university, I stopped her for a moment and said: “before we talk about that, I just want to say that I get all of my sense of feeling valued directly from my students; and I think very little about how the university chooses to value me.”
An examined life.