Palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware spent years sitting with people at the end of their lives and the most common regret she heard was this:
“I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
Obvious enough, something guttural goes on with a line like this, but somehow the most obvious question gets missed. What does “a life true to myself” even mean?
If you’ve spent any time with us, you’ll know by now that the way we do things around here is to follow questions into questions, not answers. I write this with more than a hint of glee. Surely we can agree there is no answer to a question of ‘true life’?
So where are the next questions? “Who am I today?” “What is life?” “What is ‘myself’”?
Yes, and. Yes, and. Yes, and.
The people we want to work with are the ones who want to investigate the not-knowing. Our highest hope, after a few nights together, isn’t to send you home with answers, but deeper roots.
To get to someone like Bronnie Ware with a smile on your face. “I didn’t let the moment pass me by. I kept my questions nearby. I listened loudly. I made a pact with myself and my allies and the all that is to not bow to people pleasing. I am not a trend.”
The people we want to work with haven’t lost their way, they’ve poured themselves into the moment enough times that they realise they’ve been making a way the whole time.
Traveler, there is no path.
The path is made by walking.
Traveller, the path is your tracks
And nothing more.
By walking you make a path
And turning, you look back
At a way you will never tread again
Traveller, there is no road
Only foam trails on the sea.
Antonio Machado
Activist. Educator. Founder. Leader. Parent. If you’re doing good work in the world, then people-pleasing needs to go.
If you’re carrying genuine weight in the world, care deeply about you do, it’s imperative that you see when you are being and when you are living out a story you inherited.
This work, this disentanglement, is surely not possible whilst you’re in it. Or, if it is, surely the power is low? When the people and settings and structures around you continually remind you of who you should be being, what is there to be said for the energy in your defences, and therefore the energy in your light? Showing up whole?
The person you’re extraordinarily good at being is not necessarily the same person you actually are. And they can be very hard to tell apart. They wear the same clothes, sleep in the same bed, say the same things through the same mouth in the same tone.
But something inside you is wondering at it all. Catching the moments your word and your soul are giving one another side-eye. Usually just before sleep. Or when you wake up in the middle of the night. Or the signal goes when you’re mid audiobook and you wonder why the silence is stifling.
I had a conversation with Alys about this, I’ll post it below. If you don’t watch it, the line I want to bring out is: “You’ve met people who are in alignment”.
And part of what she was driving at was the sense of clarity. The face of someone who knows themselves, has ‘done their work’. Are they bolshy? Not quite (that’s another bunch). But they’re also not moving particularly easily. They’ve explored what boundaries are. And, is that a smile? Even in the face of failure?
And back and back we find ourselves, to the first set of questions in this article. What is it to live a life true to myself? And what does it have to do with boundaries?
Most people go a lifetime without space for these questions.
Most people miss the opportunity to get out of their own way and let something else come into the space of the question.
That’s what we’re going to do.
This May, we’re running a four-day residential in Cornwall for people who want to ask the deeper questions before they become regret. It’s not a retreat, or a programme. It’s not a therapy or a 5-step-approach. It’s something older and stranger and, we think, more honest.
You wake up among the trees. Not because you’re the kind of person who does this sort of thing. Maybe you’ve never done anything like this before, and the drive down felt slightly ridiculous, and when you got out of the car and saw the woodland and the cottage and the fire pit you thought what am I doing here?
Whether it feels unusual, or like you’re living out your position of privilege whilst the world is burning, the question is good ground.
The kind of people who book four days in Cornwall to sit with an ancient story and a small group of strangers is not someone who has it all figured out.
It’s someone who is moving inexorably to the point of recognising they have not.
That, infact, none of us do.
And in the grief of that recognition (Dougald Hine might say, “There are no adults in the room”), there is also joy. Not because we’re going nihilistically over the edge, but because it is true and the pain and suffering comes from hiding from it.
This event is for the someone you are, or the someone you know, who has been carrying a question that their normal life doesn’t have room for.
You’ll hear the myth of Tristan and Isolde told by firelight on the banks of the River Fal, in the landscape where the story was born.
You’ll breathe with ancient oak trees and swim in the river.
You’ll walk ground that has held people far longer than you or I have been trying to make sense of things.
You’ll sit with others at the crossroads, and something about the combination of the story and the place and the company will begin to do something that no strategy document or leadership programme has managed.
You will make a commitment to yourself and the life you want to lead.
You will do the kind of work you must do yourself, but you will not be alone.
We don’t know why it works. But it bloody does. And our job is to get it out of the way.
Our friend, past participant and conservationist Anona Dawson says: “Mesmeric, deeply moving and uplifting for a tired soul. Those moments of stillness and reflection are still viscerally with me now.”
Manda Scott titled her Accidental Gods episode about this work “The Joy of Becoming Lost.” I think she’s right. I think the joy is precisely the part people don’t expect.
The event runs 14–17 May at The Lost Cottage of Penperth, a taxi from Truro train station, Cornwall. Off grid, ancient oak woodland, on the river. A myth, a small group, proper time. Twelve spaces total. £695.
Once picking up your ticket, we ask you to write a short letter: why now is the moment to bring greater clarity and courage to your journey.
That act of writing it is where the work begins.
If you’ve been reading these posts for a while and wondering whether this is actually for you, write to me first. hello@recallingfire.com. I’d rather have a conversation than have you decide alone.
Maybe, in the twilight, meet yourself.
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Here’s a note from me and Alys about the work and why it matters:
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