Life's Four Basic Areas of Activity

When choosing a dream to follow, it's good to consider the four basic areas in which people live. They are

• Marriage/Family

• Career/Professional

• Social/Political

• Religious/Spiritual

Naturally, in the course of a lifetime, people tend to spend some time in each. Looking back, however, most people can say, 'Yes, I gave the majority of my time and attention to    " and mention one of the categories. Sometimes, it's the area they wanted to spend most of their time in. Other times, they spent their life in an area other than the one closest to their heart.

In choosing now which area you feel most drawn to, you can either (A) spend more time in that area, or (B) realize that the draw you feel ("I really want to do this, but I think I should do that") is from programming other than your own. Now is a good time to reprogram yourself so that the goals you follow are your own.

Here's where the "I want it all" syndrome comes in. We somehow think we're entitled to a significant goal from each of the four categories. All at once. Sorry. We haven't seen it. You can have any category you want, but you can't have every category you want.

It's easier to face this hard reality of life sooner than later. (Some people are reading this book because the hard reality came knocking on their door ... or repossessed the house, or filed divorce proceedings, or got them fired, or, or, or.)

You can spend equal amounts of time in each category, but, if you do, don't expect to go very far in any of them. You will live "a balanced life." People will remark to you, "My, what a balanced life you live."

If, in imagining this, a part or you says, I don't want, a balanced life! I want to be a rock star!" (Career/Professional) or "All I care about is my family!" (Marriage/Family) or "What difference does a balanced life make if we can't breathe the air?" (Social/Political) or 'This world is but the shadowlands; the greater world is beyond!" (Religious/Spiritual), then perhaps you're not looking for the balanced life after all.

The narrower your goal — and the more fully you supply that goal with all your time, energy and resources — the farther you'll go and the faster you'll get there. Think of a rocket. All the energy is pinpointed in one direction, and it can zoom off to distant planets.

The downside of rocket travel? You can't bring your house and your family and report for work on time and save the whales and take all your religious and spiritual books and... etc. Very little fits in the capsule of a rocket. If, however, seeing the moon close-up and in-person is your heart's desire, letting go of all but that "very little" is the price you must pay.

"All right. I'll settle for pictures of the moon."

Much less investment is required for that. You can even have a video of the moon. In color. Let go, however, of the dream of seeing the moon in-person and close-up. It will free-up energy you can put toward the dream you do choose to achieve.

In the next four chapters, we'll take a look at each of the four basic areas of activity. Along the way, we'll dispel a few of the myths that have grown around each. These are, for the most part, things that anyone who's done them will tell you. We thought you might want to know before spending, oh, twenty years finding out.

Before discussing the four areas, let us first mention a concept called The Mirror.

The mirror concept says that all life is a mirror, and by looking into the mirror of life, we can learn a great deal about ourselves. The mirror concept asks, "What if everything you like in people and things around you is really reflecting back to you something you yourself?" If you admire people who are kind, for example, they are reflecting back to you the kindness within yourself.

On the other hand, the mirror also reflects back what we don't like about ourselves. When we dislike someone for being selfish, perhaps there's a selfishness within ourselves that we don't like.

The mirror works just as well with things as with people. In fact, it's sometimes easier to see that we're projecting our feelings about ourselves onto something else when the object is inanimate. If we're moved by the grandeur of the sky, it's obvious that the grandeur is our projection. The sky is the sky. No grandeur there, other than the grandeur we put there.

Using the mirror concept, we can use everything in life to teach us more about ourselves. Each area of life acts as a magnifying mirror to one aspect or another of ourselves. The area of ourselves we find most intriguing — the one we would most like to explore — is often the one we gravitate toward when choosing an area of life with which to become involved.

Marriage and Family

The myths about marriage and family are omnipresent in our culture. The myths are perpetrated in almost every movie, TV show, song, magazine, book, billboard and advertisement.

The mythical scene goes something like this: You are trudging along in life — lonely, but coping. Some Enchanted Evening (across a crowded room) you meet The Perfect Stranger (as opposed to a total stranger). Fade in music. Fade out loneliness. You are lifted to the pinnacle of bliss, where you and Prince Charming or Cinderella live happily ever after.

This is the most popular version of the larger, underlying myth that says things and people outside ourselves can make us happy. ("You made me love you, I didn't want to do it...")

In fact, we make us happy. ("If you are lonely when you are alone," cautioned Jean-Paul Sartre, "you are in bad company.") The joy we see in others is a reflection of the joy in ourselves. We feel uncomfortable, however, giving ourselves credit for our own joy. It's easier to say, "You're wonderful, and I'm so happy you're with me," than to say, "I'm wonderful, and I'm so happy to be me." It may be easier to say, but it's not (A) honest, and (B) easy to live.

It's not easy to live because, if we feel happiness only when that other person is around, then we have to keep that other person around in order to be happy. If that person happens to be lost in the same illusion, that's called "being in love," and everything is hunky dory — for a while. (As Cher observed, "The trouble with some women is that they get all excited about nothing — and then marry him.")

Eventually, no matter how hard we keep up the facade, one or the other will peek behind it and see The Dark Side, which is not at all lovable. "He loved me absolutely," wrote Frieda (Mrs. D. H.) Lawrence, "that's why he hates me absolutely."

The Dark Side is, of course, only something we see in another that we don't like about ourselves, and, again, are not honest enough to admit. If A sees B's Dark Side, but B fails to see A's Dark Side, it's Dump City. A cries, "Free Again!" and B sings a medley of torch songs. If both see it at once, the perfect lovers become the perfect enemies.

Are we being harsh, on love and marriage? Look at the statistics. In the United States, half the marriages end in divorce within five years. Half! ("In Hollywood all the marriages are happy," Shelley Winters observed. 'It's trying to live together afterwards that causes all the problems.")

Remember, these are the couples who stood before God, friends and in-laws, swearing to love one another till death did them part. Imagine how many others, who thought they were in love forever, never made it to the altar. ("My boyfriend and I broke up," Rita Rudner explained, "He wanted to get married and I didn't want him to.")

Which brings us to children. Children are a 24-hour-a-day commitment, for a minimum of eighteen years — probably longer. With children, you can learn something very important: how to give for the sheer joy of giving. If you give to children with any hope of return, you're inviting misery all around. ("Before I was married I had three theories about raising children," John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, wrote. "Now I have three children and no theories.")

In fact, that's one of the primary lessons one learns — not just from children but from intimate relationships of all kinds — how to give.

The myth is that marriage is for receiving. It's not. It's for giving. ("Marriage is not merely sharing the fettucini," Calvin Trillin explained, "but sharing the burden of finding the fettucini restaurant in the first place.")

Don't take our word for it. Ask anyone who's been in a successful relationship for, oh, at least two years. They'll almost certainly describe themselves as giving, with no thought of return. If they go on and on about how much fun it was to receive, you're probably talking to Zsa Zsa Gabor.

(Zsa Zsa was once on a call-in radio snow. The caller asked, "I want to break up with a man, but he's been so nice to me. He gave me a car, a diamond necklace, a mink stole, beautiful gowns, a stove, expensive perfumes — what should I do?" Without having to think, Zsa Zsa said, "Give him back the stove."), ..

Another cultural myth is that we are somehow incomplete if we do not reproduce. This may have had some validity when being fruitful and multiplying was necessary for a species or tribe to continue. Today, however, one of the great problems in the world is overpopulation. Let those who really want to reproduce reproduce (and that includes providing the 18-year environment in which the reproductions can grow into functioning, creative, healthy humans). Those who want to leave their legacy in another way can feel free to do so.

Another value of relationship is learning about ourselves — the good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. Marriage is like a dinner with desert first. The falling in love portion shows us the beauty within us. Everything else shows us everything else. It's a package deal. When The Dark Side presents itself and says, "I'm in you, too. Learn to love and accept me in yourself," many people panic.

"Wait a minute. This isn't part of the contract." "Yes it is. For better or for worse. This is worse." "This is the worst. Where's the lovey-dovey stuff?"

"Maybe that bird will return when you learn to love this one."

"I have to learn to love it?"

"You only have to learn to accept it. Loving it, however, feels better."

People seldom want to face the Dark Side of themselves. Instead, they (choose one or more):

1. Deny it's a mirror and pretend it's the other person. (One must be careful not to strike out too severely at a mirror, for, as we all know, if you break a mirror, it's seven years bad luck — perhaps in jail.)

2. Pretend really hard that everything is all right, and "play house." ("Welcome to At Home with the Ostrich Family. Here's mother, Heroic Pretender; and father, General Denial. Here are their children, Make Believe, Gloss Over and Feign Affection. Don't they look happy? The Ostrich Family!")

3. See that the reflected Dark Side they see in the mirror is true about themselves and hate them selves even more.

4. Run!

For those looking for an intensive workshop in self-discovery, self-acceptance, and the perfect place to learn The Joy of Giving, Marriage/Family is an area of life to consider.

(If you thought we were perhaps too hard on marital bliss, let's close with a romantic thought from Britt Ekland: "I know a lot of people didn't expect our relationship to last — but we just celebrated our two months anniversary.")

Career and Professional

Did you ever hear parents placing a curse upon their child? "Someday, something's going to straighten you out!" That's what a career is — The Great Straightener.

Next to gravity, there's very little as constant as the business world — it will drag you down if you slip too often, or hurl you to the moon if you understand how to use it. (Most of the energy used in traveling to the moon and back was the gravitational pull of the moon and Earth.) Wernher von Braun found the business side of putting a man on the moon more difficult than the functional side. "We can lick gravity," he said, "but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming."

A job is what you have when you want to take money to some other area of life in order to buy the necessities of life. Someone whose primary focus is marriage, for example, leaves the marriage only long enough to make enough money to support the marriage — baby needs a new pair of shoes, and all that. That's a job.

(Not that staying home and working isn't a job. To illuminate, here's Roseanne Barr: "As a housewife, I feel that if the kids are still alive when my husband gets home from work, then hey, I've done my job. When Sears comes out with a riding vacuum cleaner, then I'll clean the house." One could follow Quentin Crisp's advice, "There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse. It's simply a question of not losing your nerve.")

A career or profession is when the thing you love doing most is what you also get paid for doing, so you can do it all the time. As Noel Coward said, "Work is much more fun than fun." Or, as Richard Bach remarked, "The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work."

"But I am an artist," some may say. "I only want to create." If you plan to get paid for creating, then you're in business. "But someone will discover me and take care of all that." Right, and if you have nothing to wear to the ball, your fairy godmother will supervise the mice and the birds in making you a gown.

The days of being "discovered" in the arts went out with Diaghelev and Lana Turner. Artists — and that includes actors, singers, writers, dancers, musicians, painters, and so on — must become their own supporters, must champion their own cause. To succeed, they must become patron and protegee, all in one. In other words, if you're a creative person, you must create your own creative outlet. And that means being in business.

(In 1988, twenty publishers turned down our first book, You Can't Afford the Luxury of a Negative Thought, so we published it ourselves. We then published LIFE 101 ourselves, and this one, too, because we realized there's a lot more to getting a book into our readers' hands than merely writing it.)

The secret of success in a career? Same as success in any other area. As John Moores explained, "Work seven days a week and nothing can stop you." Not only is it hard work, it's hard, challenging work. "If you have a job without aggravations," Malcolm Forbes pointed out, "you don't have a job."

One must, however, not just work hard. One must work smart. As the saying goes, the efficient person gets the job done right; the effective person gets the right job done. "The really idle man gets nowhere," Sir Heneage Ogilvie observed. 'The perpetually busy man does not get much further."

Of course, a career is not for everyone. Lily Tomlin said, "The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat."

And, yes, in addition to long hours and hard work, each career has its Dark Side. "The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling," James Baldwin explained, "is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side."

When one peeks through the glamour, one sees what's real, and one may not like it. As Fred Allen said, "When you get through "all the phony tinsel of Hollywood, you find the genuine tinsel underneath." David Sarnoff remarked, "Competition brings out the best in products, and the worst in people."

One especially may not like it when one remembers the mirror — the things we don't like about our career are also what we don't like about ourselves. Is your career insincere? Dishonest? Heartless? Gulp. Behold, the mirror.

If one is willing to see a career as a great, big mirror (career and mirror — they even rhyme, if you pronounce them with a vague, Southern accent), there's a lot to learn — things most people don't want to learn about themselves.

Rather than looking in either the relationship or career mirrors, some spend time looking in one until it becomes uncomfortable, then run off to look in the other. Back and forth, eternally.

The career vs. marriage struggle has been going on since the caveperson who invented the first wheel decided to open Wheels R Us.

One side of the discussion is expressed by George Jean Nathan; "Marriage is based on the theory that when a man discovers a brand of beer exactly to his taste he should at once throw up his job and go to work in a brewery."

Representing the other side of the argument, we present Bertrand Russell: "One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important."

"Can't I have both a career and a marriage?" Well, some can. And some can juggle seven balls while eating a tuna fish sandwich.

What happens at the end of a long, successful career? You'll be glad you chose career over everything else, brimming with pride over all you've accomplished, right?

Well...

T. S. Eliot, poet, Nobel Laureate — but better known as the lyricist for Cats, heaven help his memory — wrote, "As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing."

And Sir Thomas More, after fifteen years of practicing law, wrote in his view of an ideal future, Utopia, "They have no lawyers among them, for they consider them as a sort of people whose profession it is to disguise matters."

Or, as Robert Frost put it, "By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day."

Social and Political

If the sentence, "I love humanity, it's people I can't stand," fits you, perhaps you should consider a life of social change and political action.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil," Edmund Burke wrote two hundred years ago, "is for good men to do nothing." The world has any number of good people right now, with the dream to make changes for the better deep in their hearts. The problem is not that they're doing nothing, the problem is that they're doing something else.

People who are naturally drawn toward social action or politics are often repelled by its name. "Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation," Henry Kissinger said. Here is an area of activity where the reputation is worse than the reality — a sort of reverse glamour.

"I used to say that politics was the second oldest profession," said Ronald Reagan in 1979, "and I have come to know that it bears a gross similarity to the first." The following year, however, he won the presidency.

"Nobody could sleep with Dick," Pat Nixon revealed. "He wakes up during the night, switches on the lights, speaks into his tape recorder, or takes notes — it's impossible."

John Updike had this explanation for the inconsistency of our leaders: "A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world."

And yet, with all the bad things written about it, some do have good words for and about the art of politics.

"True leadership must be for the benefit of the followers," wrote Robert Townsend in Up the Organization, "not the enrichment of the leaders." Townsend was speaking of the business world, but it applies to the political world just as well.

You may not always be popular, even among those you are helping. Harry Truman asked, "How far would Moses have gone if he had taken a poll in Egypt?"

"Public life is regarded as the crown of a career, and to young men it is the worthiest ambition," said John Buchan. "Politics is still the greatest and the most honorable adventure."

"Politics," Gore Vidal wrote, with his own enticing twist on Buchan, "is the grim jockeying for position, the ceaseless trading, the deliberate use of words not for communication but to screen intention. In short, a splendidly exciting game for those who play it."

"If you're going to play the game properly," cautioned Barbara Jordan, "you'd better know every rule."

The great social causes that capture the hearts of men and women do not necessarily involve politics. They do, however, involve courage, sacrifice, commitment, and selfless giving — sort of the worst of marriage and career combined.

There are, however, inner benefits. "The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it," William James said, in words that outlasted him.

And let's make no mistake about it: we make social changes because, over time, it makes us feel better. We may not appreciate the day-to-day tilting at windmills, but we prefer that to, day-by-day, observing a condition we know we could somehow make better, get worse.

People often think a social problem is too great, and they are too small. We suggest: If drawn to do it, do it. "What one has to do," Eleanor Roosevelt pointed out, "usually can be done."

The reward is the joy of giving, the satisfaction of following your heart's desire, and, perhaps, someone will say of you what Clare Boothe Luce said of Eleanor Roosevelt, "No woman has ever so comforted the distressed — or distressed the comfortable."

Religious and Spiritual

Here we co-authors tread softly. In LIFE 101, we put all the religious and spiritual beliefs — from Anglicanism to agnosticism to atheism to Catholicism — in an area we called The Gap.

The contents of anyone's Gap is between the person and the contents of his or her Gap. We don't get involved with the Gap in these books because the tools we discuss work regardless of what's in anyone's Gap, just as a cookbook or car repair manual works for the Baptist and the Buddhist alike.

In discussing the areas of life's activity, however, we must touch upon an area certain people are strongly drawn to — religion and spirit.

What can we say, other than — if this is your heart's desire, follow it.

There is an interesting ambivalence to religion and spirituality in our culture. On one hand, if people have no beliefs, they are thought old. On the other hand, if they devote all their time to the understanding and worship of God, they, too, are thought odd.

As with politics, people may hesitate pursuing Spirit full time because religion has been so, well, shall we say (tap, tap, tap) has made God to look, uh, um (tap, tap, tap — that's us co-authors tap dancing while arriving at a diplomatic, nonjudgemental way of saying this), perhaps some people's behavior has not cast The Deity in the best possible light.

For example, the chief executive of a very popular soft drink company said, "It's a religion as well as a business." (By the way, do you know that the taste of cola is a combination of three familiar flavors? Which Three? If you want to guess, we'll wait for a bit before telling you.)

Others seem to use God as some great bellhop in the sky — "give me this, send me that, take this away" — a little, um, uh, silly. Dorothy Parker parodied these people when she wrote, "Oh God, in the name of Thine only be-loved Son, Jesus Christ, Our Lord, let him phone me now."

All of this — and we haven't even mentioned televangelists and their traumas — may have made traditional religion seem a little strange, even to those who feel a calling. Our advice: follow your heart.

Some want to explore less traditional forms of contacting the Divine, but don't because all that seems weird, too. All we can say is that every major religion was, at one time, a small group of people surrounded by a culture that thought them awfully bizarre. As Tom Wolfe pointed out, "A cult is a religion with no political power." Again, follow your heart — but, as always, don't forget your head.

Of course, there are those who think they should spend all their time worshipping God because, after all, God is God and isn't that what we're supposed to do? And, even though these people are off pursuing a goal in another area of life, they feel guilty for not praying more — as though God were an overanxious mother who hasn't had a phone call in a month. (Although, if that is your image of God, far be it from us to de-Deify you.) Might we suggest to these people that they let their good works in whatever field they choose glorify God? (Cola, by the way, is made up of these three flavors: citrus [lemon or lime], vanilla and cinnamon.)

And for those who are feeling the Ultimate Unworthiness — not worthy to serve God — we offer you this from Phyllis McGinley: "The wonderful thing about saints is that they were human. They lost their tempers, scolded God, were egotistical or testy or impatient in their turns, made mistakes and regretted them. Still they went on doggedly blundering toward heaven."

⇐ Предыдущая78910111213141516Следующая ⇒

Поделиться: