The Path of Unavoidibility

I’m beta-reading a 650 page book called Happypedia for a job that will pay me $5 and earn me my first 5-star rating on Upwork. It’s a platform for freelance work. Not just for writers, but that’s what I’m looking for. It sounds like I’m getting scammed, right? $5 to read a huge book and then post a review on Amazon? Yeah, but, I get a free book out of it and that 5-star review will help me get other gigs on Upwork. One job I applied for asks for writers who are also runners, into weight training, and like to be outdoors. Another one was equally as made for me. So, we’ll see.

It’s a big enough deal for me to admit that I’m a writer, but even bigger to apply for a paid writing job, even if it’s a pittance. Applying for these freelance jobs fills my stomach with monkeys. There’s a potential for rejection in general, but also the potential that even if I get the job, I’m not good enough to do it.

But here’s the thing.

A while back, I wrote a blog post about how I self-sabotage because I’m afraid of what it might mean for my life if I succeed. There’s a lot of psychology behind that because I also know that a lot of my life decisions heretofore have been based on the boy or man I was with. If I succeeded at something, would I lose him? It’s a confidence thing. It’s not even that I worried that any potential success would make a man feel threatened. I’ve always felt that the exact life situation in the moment was so tenuous and “perfect” that if anything destabilized it or changed it, he’d leave me. Picture me delicately holding a kind of spider web world in my hands and slowly walking around so as not to disturb the spider or make the web bounce even a little and topple the houses built upon it.

Fucked up, I know. But if I spend time thinking about it, I can see the direct line back from that thinking to my childhood. My parents were divorced before I stopped breast-feeding. I was basically born into a custody battle with parents who were emotionally immature, selfish for their own reasons, and broken by their upbringings, mental illnesses, and personal experiences. All I’ve ever known is trying to keep the peace by sacrificing myself as the trophy for one or the other side to win. I recognized that at a very young age. In fact, I remember the conversation I had with my father on a Saturday evening, when I was younger than twelve. We were taking a walk in his apartment complex. I told him that I felt like a chess piece, a pawn, a trophy, being pulled at by him on one end of a rope and my mother on the other end.

That didn’t have any kind of impact on him because when I turned twelve, he fought hard to get custody of me during the time called Age of Election when I could “decide for myself” who I wanted to live with. Oh, the name calling and emotional outbursts that spewed forth from that man.

What I’m learning from reading the book Happypedia is that many things in life, like my fear of success and my father’s childish and abusive rants, are “unavoidable”.

That word, or the idea of the word, has become a mental exercise for me. You see, the author, Adam Brownlie, is making the case, based on scientific research from a number of disciplines, along with the study of other philosophies throughout time, that we aren’t fated, we aren’t predestined by god, and we don’t have the free will we’d like to think we do. He’s explaining, very carefully, and slowly, (that’s why there are 650 pages), because he knows this is going against many peoples’ strongly held beliefs. He knows some of the ideas he presents will make readers uncomfortable. And that’s a good thing.

I’m only 37% of the way through the book (I’m reading on Kindle, it shows the percentage not the page number, I’m not that kind of a nerd), but I feel myself settling into the concept of unavoidability. That said, if what I write here doesn’t explain it well enough, it’s not because he’s not doing a good job of it, it’s that I’m still grappling with it. That’s not to say that I disagree. It’s that I’m fighting against letting go of other beliefs that I really, really want to be true, but probably aren’t. Like free will.

I’ve grown up self-identifying and being described as bohemian. Well, probably the last time anyone described me that way was about five years ago. As I’ve been writing about recently, I’ve kind of lost my way and am trying to find the path back to myself. The point is, the idea of free will feels good to me. It’s been my go-to argument against a lot of people who have tried to foist their religious views on me. “Yeah, but God gave us free will”. If I was a better philosopher and debater, I could make the case that even that statement negates the idea of free will. No one, not even god, can give it to you. So then, perhaps, we don’t have it to begin with.

Am I okay with that?!

Does a lack of free will mean that I am being driven around by god? (I intentionally do not capitalize the word because I do not believe in the Abrahamic God but I do leave a door open for some kind of god…just because there are some things I don’t have answers to.)

Here’s what Brownlie means when he says we don’t have free will and our decisions, actions, and thoughts are unavoidable: our genetics and our personal experiences drive us.

Like my brief back-tracing the reason why I self-sabotage. (It’s only because I don’t feel like boring you with more of my life or the lives of my parents that I didn’t keep going further back.) If you spend time thinking about why you said or did or thought something, you might be able to see the reason why. Of course, and Brownlie goes into this (it’s the chapter I’m on right now), there are some things your thinking brain doesn’t consciously capture. Something could be information it doesn’t need to hold as a memory or it doesn’t need to hold for long.

Another example from my life.

For a while now, I’ve experienced seemingly random flashes of intersections in Missoula. Like, actual street intersections. Boring places. Like, the intersection by the used book store near the fairgrounds. The backdrop looking south isn’t particularly spectacular (i.e.; the mountains), but that spot holds a lot of memories for me. Or the intersection when coming over the Madison Street Bridge toward the University of Montana’s campus. So many memories there - driving to paddleboard on the Clark Fork by myself for the first time, biking across and being a little nervous about the traffic, running there to get back home from the North Hills, driving to meet a friend for coffee at Liquid Planet, driving to see a hospice patient for their weekly massage.

I get random flashes of Tokyo, particularly the quiet path along the Sumida River.

This morning I had a strange memory of the inside of an architectural salvage store. At first I thought it was a shop in Missoula, but when I thought harder about it and visualized walking around it and outside of it, I realized it was in Columbus, Ohio, close to my house. I hadn’t thought about that place in over a decade.

These memories and flashes aren’t by accident. They aren’t actually random. If I spent time thinking about the context of the moment when they occur, what might have prompted it (I’m trying to avoid the word “triggered” just because it’s trite), and what the memory meant to me originally, I’d see the connecting threads.

One of the stories I started writing back in Ohio was about those kinds of threads. And that’s one of the stories I lost in the move to Montana. I lost two boxes. They were packed on the truck that took my big stuff, but never made it to my apartment. One box had all of my forks and my Star Wars Trivial Pursuit. Another box had a green binder stuffed with notes from two or three stories I was writing (one had the dictionary to an entire language I was building for it), along with pictures of my mother and other family members. I’m not so hung up on the loss of memorabilia, but I do hate to think about that green binder. Someone got that box. Talk about practicing unattachment. That’s a hard one to let go of.

I enjoy visualizing the threads that connect things: people, events, thoughts. When you work in the service industry, like a yoga studio or a wine shop, you get to see how non-random people actually are. Back in Columbus, many people didn’t come to yoga class when it was drizzling, but they’d slog in a downpour or in the worst snow storm. Go figure. The next time you go someplace that you just thought to visit that morning, look around at the other people who also chose to go there at the same time you did. All of time and existence brought you all there at that moment at the same time.

There are other things you can ponder and see how they arose, how they were born, how they came about. So many things that I see aren’t that surprising to me when I trace it back.

I’m still working through my thoughts about how to grasp decision-making at all, with this concept of unavoidability. My background in Buddhism either lines up well or butts heads. Like the Dalai Lama’s statement about worry: If there’s a solution or something is fixable, don’t worry (implying, “Then fix it, dummy”). If there’s not a solution or it’s not fixable, worrying doesn’t help.

Or the serenity prayer: Grant me the peace to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

I think what I’m stuck on is that just because something may be unavoidable doesn’t mean I stop taking action. It just means that there’s a cause behind the decision I made. I might have two reasonable actions to take. Maybe one doesn’t at all align with who I am. It’s out of character. The other is more up my alley. And so I do the thing that’s in alignment. Or maybe both choices are in alignment and one is just more so. Or maybe neither. And choosing neither is also a decision in alignment.

I’m processing this on the page with you reading along. I apologize.

This unavoidability is simply a new word for something I probably already accept. And my brain battle is expanding my old definition of unavoidable.

I like intellectual and philosophical challenges. I like the feeling in my brain of grappling with a concept. It’s like how it feels to clean up a kneaded eraser. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a blob of synthetic rubber or sometimes PVC (I had to look it up since I’ve never known what the hell it was made of). It’s used by artists as an eraser, but once you rub the pencil marking off the page, you knead the blob to clean it. It’s kind of tough like a big wad of really old chewing gum. That’s what my brain feels like sometimes when I’m working through a new concept.

There are other parts of Happypedia that are a mental challenge for me and also a bit uncomfortable. I like that. It means I’m learning and growing. That’s a good thing when you’re fifty. I’ll be damned if I’m that old person (I’m not “old” yet, by the way, I’m just being preemptive) that is so stuck in their ways that I can’t accept something new.

This takes me back to self-sabotage. (Whew, I wasn’t sure if I was going to make that circle-back, but I did!)

I’m not afraid of challenges and risks. I wouldn’t consider myself a risk-taker, per se. You’ll never fucking ever see me bungie jump or sky-dive. My hands are sweating just typing about it. But, I’m not afraid of trying something new. Like, opening a wine shop when I don’t necessarily know much about wine or the restaurant industry. Sure, I drank wine before and spent one summer as a server and bartender in my 20s. But that wasn’t really enough to open a shop. I knew I was going to learn along the way and I wasn’t afraid of that.

When I quit my job at Itentive, making 6-figures, to become a yoga teacher (the day after my last day, I flew to Santa Barbara for yoga teacher training), I wasn’t worried.

In many of the things I’ve done, like working with the product NextGen in healthcare IT, like owning my yoga studio, I’ve risen to the top of the totempole. I don’t mean to be culturally offensive by saying that, but, I’m not afraid to be at the top of my game and then give it all up to start back at the bottom doing something new. Perhaps leaving a good thing and starting a new thing was a way of keeping myself in one spot with that one man at the time. But maybe it was my way of building my foundation, like a stone path.

People comment frequently on how many things I’ve done. I’d like to think I’ve done a lot of things really well. The first month I worked as a server, I won server of the month. The next month, I was allowed to move to being a bartender. Ironically, that’s when I learned that I hate working with drunk people. That’s ironic because I learned that in my 20s and then, in my late 40s, decided I’d open a wine shop. But, there’s a thread that connects all of those things. A web, even.

Still, I like the challenge. Living in Petersburg has been a huge challenge. I’m a hard-core liberal Yankee living in the place where the Civil War ended, 30-minutes from the seat of the Confederacy?! But you know what, I’ve learned a lot. And there’s a thread that brought me here. My step-father was from this area. I wanted to live in Virginia for a time back in my 30s (and actively played the lottery to try to get the money to buy property here).

I think part of my frustration right now is that I can feel threads pulling me in another direction. I’m anxious. The good kind. My tail is wagging. It’s almost as if I can see forward or further along the thread, the path is so obvious to me. I felt this once before in the three months before I moved to Missoula.

But, time needs to happen. There’s stuff I need to do, things I need to experience.

All of this may be unavoidable, but I need time and experience to add a few more stones to my path.

(I’ll keep you posted on my progess through Happypedia. So far, I highly recommend it. It’s an easy, enjoyable read and really does bring together all the best stuff from all the self-help books I’ve read in the past year and a half.)

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