The Hidden Gift Under the ‘Chaos’

I sat in my office, text messages, emails, and phone calls frantically pouring in. I felt like I wanted to scream into a pillow, my head felt like it was in a vise. The phone sat on the desk in front of me, as if waiting for me to acknowledge its demands.

A multi-million dollar contract was hanging in the balance and I was at the center of it. Yet, some part of me was almost sitting back and just watching it all play out, wondering about why I was feeling this way, remembering the words that I heard earlier that morning while meditating; ‘A Gift’.

‘A Gift’…odd words to associate with such circumstances, yet, they seemed to point towards something I had felt slowly growing over the past year.

In order to understand this moment though, I needed to look back into my own past experiences. Experiences that gradually built one upon another to get me to this day.

A Glimmer.

I think it started the day I found out the company I work for was being sold. I learned they intended to terminate the manager that I had working for me for almost 10 years now and have me take on his workload along with my current duties.

I was devastated by this news. I felt an obligation to protect him, he had done nothing other than be a cost line on a spreadsheet they didn’t want. At the same time, I had no desire to go back to holding the entire workload on my own.

I had spent the entire day authoring stories for myself about all the ways this could play out, scheming my every move, trying to anticipate every possible outcome. I had even made a threat to resign.

Then, as I got home late in the afternoon exhausted by the events of the day I pulled open the mailbox to find a letter from the State Department of Revenue. I stood on the doorstep, opened the letter, and found a tax bill that appeared to me at the time like a death blow.

I remember that at that very instant I felt my neck crystallize, and I could physically hear the crackling and popping as it did so. In that brief moment, it felt like the end.

But why, why did it feel like the end? Because it wasn’t; it all worked out fine. So why did it feel so impossible?

Stories Have Power

It’s an interesting thing, the stories our mind weaves all so efficiently, and almost without effort. It feels all too real in the moment; but I have slowly begun to learn what almost feels like a well-kept secret, a secret that is right in the open to see if it is looked for.

After decades of journaling I have found a repeated pattern in life, one that I suspect we all share. Something ‘bad’ happens ‘to us’. We begin to try to ‘solve’ it. Life continues.

Often, sometimes years later, we look back on that moment and wonder why it felt so devastating or why did we feel the way we felt, or acted the way we did.

How often the things we tell ourselves in moments of ‘crisis’ end up being just that, stories.

But stories have power.

Consider the following

A man walked past the same barking dog every morning.

Each day he thought, “That dog hates me.”

So he tightened his body, avoided eye contact, and hurried past. The dog sensed his tension and barked even louder.

One morning, the man tried a different story.

“Maybe the dog is frightened. Maybe it doesn’t know me yet.”

He slowed down, relaxed his shoulders, and spoke gently as he passed.

The dog still barked, but less fiercely.

A week later, it only watched him.

The dog had changed, but so had the man. And it was impossible to say which one changed first.

The mind is an incredible author that can write us into freedom, or into a prison of our own making…but what does that mean in actual lived life?

What Lies in the Dark

At the time of the tax bill, I think I thought it meant that in a way I can control the outcome by being in control of the stories I tell myself.

Today, I think there is truth in that statement, but I’m learning it’s not so much controlling the actual outcome. It is more about determining what our own experience of it will be.

A simple Tarot card pulled in the morning helped me see this more clearly

I like to pull a single Tarot card each morning as a focus point of reflection for the day. Not as some kind of future-telling exercise, but more like a lens to view the day.

One morning I pulled the five of pentacles; a card traditionally associated with hardship. I would be lying if I said I didn’t give a small flick when I flipped it over, but I went on with the day as usual.

That day I struggled to resolve a personal project I was working on, but later that afternoon, with the mind quiet, inspiration hit. I instantly saw the way to the solution.

More than that, I almost as quickly saw how the very aspects I had been getting most frustrated with, were the very things nudging me in this other direction. 

My mind tried to weave together stories of failure, it built a prison around me of walls that I could not see past. With those walls I could not see the solution just beyond the frustration.

Then I remembered that morning’s Tarot card, the Five of Pentacles, those men in hardship, in the cold, wounded and miserable…and all they have to do is to take their attention off the misery, look up and see the light in the window calling them to shelter.

The gift was there, in the dark, just waiting to be seen.

The Gift

So let’s go back to that morning with a multi-million dollar contract in jeopardy and endless bad news, the words ‘A gift’ lingering in my thoughts.

What gift was there to be had…it turns out it was the gift of laughter.

I left to get lunch, still in that state of almost observing my own inner turmoil rather than experiencing it. I walked the halls of the grocery store, and then I just began to laugh to myself.

The entire thing just seemed so funny.

You might ask, what could be so funny about millions of dollars on the line and all that stress?

Only if I allow circumstances, and others’ perceptions to write my story do I lose my own power.

I suddenly had this knowing that these perceived ‘circumstances’ ultimately had no power to write my story. The narratives that were flying around my head faded away, and only the laughter was left.

I Write My Story

But, does that change the outward circumstance, like the dog behind the fence? No, but it changes my experience of it entirely.

Might I lose the contract, yes, it could still be lost; but who knows what other doors that might open up in the future.

Might I lose my job, sure, but it would give me an opportunity to move on to another adventure.

It reminds me of a dream I had.

I dreamed I was living under a dictatorship. I had worked hard for the party to develop an entirely new paradigm for my team, including new uniforms, planning methods, and ways of thinking.

A communist leader seemed impressed and took our work to the other leaders. The leader later returned with soldiers who stripped the room bare and dragged my team away. 

They left only a desk and a typewriter. The dictator then asked, “Is this being awake?” and I replied, “I guess that’s for me to decide for myself, isn’t it?” I woke up with a knowing that no external authority could take away my inner sovereignty. 

What Next?

Each of the stories I have recounted have a theme. Each in their own way, on the surface, seem like troubles, things happening to me that are out of my control. On the surface, it causes this sense of wanting to react and defend myself.

I look back at my reflections during each of those experiences, and others like them; and after all the chaos has settled I can see how each brought their own gift. At the time I might have been too imprisoned by my own thoughts, my own narratives, my own stories.

What is wonderful here is, if we can look back at our moments of trouble, and we can begin to see those patterns, then what happens going into the future?

If we see that this is a pattern that happens again and again, maybe instead of being so fixated on the troubles and the things that seem to be happening to us, we can just laugh in the grocery store, find the gift of authorship, and set our own experience.