LOOKING BACK AND LETTING GO
Releasing the past to make space for the future
Tomorrow I am going on my “Soul Quest.” This is the culmination of the Purpose Guide Program for which I have been a practice client since January. The eight hours spent in one small circle out on the land is a time of fasting, meditation, and prayer. I’ll do mine out in the woods of New Hampshire. During those hours of stillness, I hope to become deeply present with nature, to make porous my skin to connect with the natural world, and catch a glimpse of the unique purpose that I am here on earth to fulfill.
One thing I do know: as exciting as it is to think of what I will receive during my Soul Quest, it’s equally if not more important to use this threshold as a time to say goodbye. Like a traveler who enters a new world with just the clothes on her back, I am realizing how important it is for me to cross into this next phase of my life with the wisdom of my experiences but no longer being defined by them. I spent some time saying goodbye to my past last week, so I could be truly open to the version of myself that I want to become, unbound to any obligations of identity to play a certain role or embody a certain persona.
PGI recommends a ceremony they call the Death Lodge. (When I first read about this, I wondered, am I engaging in cultural appropriation?) Originally inspired by the Cheyenne people, Native Americans of the Plains, the Death Lodge was “a little house away from the village where people go when they want to tell everyone they are ready to die” (The Roaring of the Sacred River, Meredith Little and Steven Foster). It is a place of peace, of clearing out unfinished business, of preparing to greet whatever is next. In Cheyenne culture, this was accompanied by various rituals, shamanic practices, and symbolic objects to help the dying person make the transition to the next world.
Based on my research, the ceremony offered by PGI is not about emulating specific rituals or practices. Instead, it’s about going to a symbolic place to offer thanks, forgiveness, and farewells to the people and places that have defined us and to contemplate the reality of our own deaths. It is about “saying things previously unsaid… saying goodbye to an identity we have outgrown.” (Soulcraft, Bill Plotkin). It is not about actually preparing for death but graciously appreciating and letting go of psychological obligations that keep us tied to (or clinging to!) a particular way of being.
As I studied the Death Lodge to trace it back to its origins and understand how PGI was using it as inspiration, I was immediately reminded of something I learned in another era of life, as the only charter school principal in a class of about 40 Principal Fellows at Stanford University. During the very first session I attended at the end of September 2018, the funny, warm Huggy Rao told us that in order to be better principals, our job was to get all the crap off our teachers’ plates so they could actually be present with their students. What? I thought. I’d spent the past two months making beautiful spreadsheets where teachers could enter their supply requests, schedule their field trips, read their weekly observation notes, add their coaching priorities, etc. I was so excited that I had systematized excellence! Now all we had to do was keep those spreadsheets up to date and we would be golden! Right?
Alack, Huggy told us about an experiment by psychologists Baba Shiv and Alexander Fedorikhin in which participants were randomly tasked with remembering either a two-digit or a seven-digit number. Then, participants were asked to walk down a long hallway for the next stage in the experiment. Oh, and by the way, the researchers said—there’s a snack cart in the hall, feel free to help yourselves! The snack cart had fruit salad and chocolate cake. It turns out the snack cart wasn’t on the way to the experiment; it was the experiment. Researchers wanted to see how decision-making was affected by a higher cognitive load. Participants with the two-digit numbers chose equal proportions of fruit and cake, but those with the seven-digit number overwhelmingly chose chocolate cake.
What does this have to do with having a great school year or saying goodbye to your previous self? As one economist at the World Bank writes, “the cognitive control or willpower necessary to resist the affective impulse to consume the cake is a depletable resource. When attention is focused elsewhere, such as on retaining a long number, there is less of this resource available to guide the decision over snack choice.” In other words, the more systems and structures and priorities our teachers had to remember, the less cognitive control our teachers had to bring to the actual presence of their students, to react with empathy and adaptiveness to what was happening in the classroom that day. Huggy summed it up: Your job as principals is to subtract, subtract, subtract from what your teachers are being asked to do! I spent the rest of the year asking myself what expectations and requirements could be done away with to make space for the things I really cared about—the “two numbers to remember”—to stay top of mind.
As I thought about saying goodbye to relationships, roles, and identities in my life, I immediately connected back to this experiment. In my professional life, it was true that when I was overcommitted I was less likely to be thoughtful, present, gracious in difficult interactions. And in my personal life, when I constantly assigned new goals and self-improvement strategies, I always felt like I had failed and forgotten something. In January when I first began to meditate for stretches longer than five minutes, I felt that after the first few breaths it was like open season for these little mosquitoes of thoughts to swarm me. I’d be sitting there with my eyes closed, breathing deeply, while in the background, “Don’t forget to install those thumblatch keepers that just arrived!” “You need to sort your mail!” “Have you updated your life budget recently?” “Are you going to have time to do your morning workout before starting your first meeting?” I would arise from meditation feeling like I had not only missed the whole point of it, but also feeling stressed by the many things I had thought of that needed to be done.
For my own farewell ceremony, I walked down the Appalachian Trail near my house, where it curves behind an old cemetery and follows Mink Brook. Under a pine tree no less than 20 inches in diameter, I sat on a floor of dry needles and watched my puppy play in the brook. Across the brook to the east, I could see the old gravestones of people who lived in this community before me. Behind me, I felt the solid force of the tree. To the north, I glimpsed sunlight on the meadow beyond the furthest trees; to the south, I looked back at the familiar path I came in on. As I began my farewells, I went back to the beginning. I said goodbye to my mom whom I lost when I was 17. I thanked her for the unconditional love she showed me and the opportunities she gave me. I forgave her for the unfinished personal work she passed down. I said goodbye as the daughter she knew. I’ll have a relationship with her memory in the future, but I’ll be someone else. When everything had been said, I turned to my father. Then I addressed Connecticut and the idyllic upbringing but taxing expectations that were part of the turf. Then San Francisco, and the beautiful land but the painful inequity of life in the city. Then I addressed my identity as a public school educator, and finally, the chapters of my self-conception—nerdy, quiet little girl. Rebellious, experimenting teenager. Grieving, determined college student. Exploring, hungry young woman. Earnest, exhausted adult. For each stage I had something to thank, something to forgive, and a lightness as I said goodbye. At the end, I was surprised that I didn’t need to forgive my exes, my bosses, or friends I’d grown apart from. Mostly I needed to say goodbye to the person I had tried to become, a person who was safe, who was acceptable, who was not quite me.
The last portion of the ceremony for me was to contemplate the question, “What would it be like if I died in a month?” I remember the grief and wistfulness of saying goodbye to my mom, a person who didn’t get to live the full arc of life she hoped and imagined for herself. It was so real for me in the weeks and months following her death. I was such an unvarnished version of myself after experiencing the shock and pain of her loss.
As I thought about this question almost 15 years later, now imagining my own death, I thought, “I would be sad for the people I love who I am leaving behind.” I would be sad not to have begun my next life’s work. I would be sad for the trips I’ve put off till a better time, for the family I’ve dreamed of having but haven’t started. I did not think, “I would be upset my thumblatch keepers aren’t installed.” I did not think about the refund I need to call Rugs USA about, the state of my investment accounts, how many days this week I had done my morning workout, or whether I made my bed today. Faced with the ultimate reality—the definite future of my own death—those things that are constantly on my to-do list as the proactive, responsible adult receded into the background. They didn’t disappear, but they took their proper place as details, to be given small space and time and not worried about too much.
Contemplating one’s own death is a heavy thing to do on a daily basis. I still feel “tender” from the time I spent in this state of mind last Sunday. But I emerged feeling even more conviction that we can’t work/reflect/effort our way into new levels of self-awareness and sense of purpose. At least not by constantly adding more. Instead, my belief is that it’s our job to evaluate and remove what no longer serves, making the space for what’s next to take shape organically-- a beautiful flower blooming into the clearing of our hearts.
I want to leave you with a poem by one of my very favorites, Mary Oliver, who gives me courage with her words to set out into the wild night of the unknown:
The Journey
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice – – –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
‘Mend my life!’
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations – – –
though their melancholy
was terrible. It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice,
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do – – – determined to save
the only life you could save.