Don’t you know how busy & important I am? Why it’s hard to go home again.
Working as a solicitor and going home for the holidays was often challenging.
One challenge being, a distinct lack of respect.
Jack Kornfield writes in After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, that Zen Master Basho warns: “You can’t teach the truth in your native town. They only know you by your childhood names. (...) as it happens, this may be the best reason to go home. (...) because they see us unclouded by spiritual ideals, by image or reputation.”
The point the author is making is that after a spiritual awakening, it can be quite difficult to go home again. Your new found wisdom won’t be respected by your friends or family, because it’s coming from you. But this is exactly why going home is valuable.
Practising loving kindness, where everyone else is on the same page, is easy. Practising loving kindness in the throws of challenging family dynamics, is more of a practice. It’s challenging because they see you in whatever context they know you in, and if they’ve known you for a long time, that context might be quite different to the identity you hold yourself in now.
This got me thinking about high achievers going home for the holidays.
When you’re a solicitor working in a law firm, most things in the business are geared towards helping the solicitor utilise their time as much as possible (as they bill by the hour). And with this, a hierarchy is formed.
This can give you an inflated sense of personal importance and subconsciously (or indeed, consciously) you can start to believe that ‘my time is more important than yours’. You become more impatient in queues, can’t bear being placed on hold, and every second it takes to get off the tube and onto the escalator counts.
The 7:30am commute on the London Underground often reminded me of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, striding to work and throwing anyone against the wall who got in his way. It was a battle of who was the most busy and important and there would be hell to pay if a tourist dared to stop to check their phone for directions, even just for 1 second.
However when you leave the City to go home for the holidays, you’re in for a rude awakening.
Your family or old school friends couldn’t give two hoots how busy and important you are, or what deals you’ve closed lately. They want to know about what else you’ve been up to. What else have you got to say?
This can actually be a shock to the system, especially if most of your time and energy ……now you’ve pointed it out…..is spent working on deals.
It can create a self consciousness. A discomfort.
When you step outside your work circle (which has become your comfort zone btw) - you realise you don’t have a lot to talk about other than work….and….people aren’t responding to you in the way that you’re used to…
There is nowhere to hide. You’re fighting for your life to find something else to talk about, something interesting to say.
You might default to talking about sport or what to watch on Netflix, but inevitably, it won’t be long before you start checking your work phone (even if there’s nothing to check) and try to find a way to retreat to your comfort zone.
The defensive parts of self will start coming into play to protect you from this horrible situation. More often than not you’ll spend the next two hours riddled with superior thoughts and feelings of ‘I don’t fit in here’, ‘we have nothing in common anymore’, and ‘they just don’t get it’.
Your ego, particularly disgruntled, may be left spitting “Where’s my respect? Don’t they know how busy and important I am?” and “Maybe I can leave early, get away from these non-serious people”.
These moments of discomfort offer a great learning opportunity to find out who you are outside of work. Because when you put 90% of your energy into work at the expense of everything else, your career will become your identity. And that’s a lonely and unsafe place to be when you leave the office.
Unsafe meaning that it leaves you vulnerable to the social situation described above, where you feel you’ve got no value to add outside of work, nothing to connect with people on, nothing to offer. In the event of sudden job loss, relationship breakdown or retirement, it can be a disaster. You can be left with feelings of “Who am I without my work?” “What was it all for?” “What is my life all about?”
Going home for the holidays gives you a glimpse of this.
So how can we calm the defensive and egoic parts of self down, resist reaching for our work phones and lean into said learning opporutnity……? The author (from earlier) recounts some advice he gave to a Buddhist nun:
“(...) however hard she tried to teach them about the dharma, it only led to conflict and more frustration. The family evenings were usually given to drinking beer and watching TV. After each disagreeable weeklong visit home, she fled. I had a few suggestions for her. “Why don’t you try going to your parents without your robes, and no teaching. Just be there as a family member and love them as they are. Maybe sit with them and sip a beer and watch the games on TV. (...). She tried it. Next time I saw her she was smiling. It worked.”
So if you’re an entrepreneur or have a busy and important job, perhaps all you need to do is disrobe when you go home. Visit as a family member or friend, not as a financially successful biz wiz or professional. Because they couldn’t care less about your status. They couldn’t care less whether you succeed or fail. All they care about is you. They love you - regardless of job title, income or status. And isn’t that a relief?
And although it may feel uncomfortable at first, if you’re brave enough to drop the pretense and ask yourself ‘Who am I without my work?” and take steps to build and put energy towards an identity outside of work, you’ll be in a much safer (and happier) place in the long run.