Recently my friend Jeff in Kansas City gave me a thought on which to chew. He said,
‘I always saw you as a Portland guy and never really as a midwest guy. I didn’t feel like you came to KC for something. Rather, I felt like you ran away from something.’
I said something glib like, ‘Yeah, I think you’re right’ and nothing more because, while I totally agreed, I couldn’t articulate what that ‘something’ was.
Last week, I wrote a missive entitled ‘Refocusing‘ about the perspective you get when you take yourself out of the middle of the picture. The next day, I figured out what the ‘something’ was:
I ran away from myself.
I ran away from a life lived almost solely in my head.
I ran away from a narrow, unsatisfying, and incomplete perspective.
As a result, I lived life in KC from my gut and from my heart. I perceived reality first through my feelings, then through my instincts, and never through my head. It was a hell of a ride.
All my life I’d done the reverse: I ‘made sense’ of something, decided how I felt about it (yes: thinking about feeling), and then checked my instinct. When I ran away in the fall of 2009, I ran from that way of living.
I ran from deficiency thinking (the deadliest weapon of the busy mind).
I ran away from hearing past friends and lovers talk about my ‘wall’, that emotional distancing which kept me safe and them on the outside.
I ran from being a self-control freak.
I ran from thinking about feeling to feeling about thinking.
As a result, I made my decisions without consulting the busy mind which had imprisoned me for 34 years. Many of those decisions were ‘foolish’ inasmuch as they didn’t ‘make sense’: keep me emotionally safe, bring in money, or advance my career.
They were the best decisions on my life.
In the late summer of 2010, I ‘let myself back in my head’ and began interpreting reality through my gut and heart, then conducting a single ‘makes sense?’ checkoff with my head. After I let myself back in my head, the money and the career naturally took off again.
Fortunately, now I see those trappings for what they are: traps.
Steven Joiner 