What Matters Most #5 That we Step into Largeness
Excerpt-James Hollis
Jung’s homey proverb that most of the time, “we walk in shoes too small for us,” reminds us that the necessity of adaptation to the voices around us, the demands of our environment, require that we mostly live through adaptive psychologies rather than being guided by an instinctually driven center that wishes embodiment through us into the world. Additionally, his metaphor suggests that on most days we suffer a failure of nerve. Living “small” is easier than living large. Living “large” is not narcissistic inflation,28 but rather encountered in the daily summons to risk being who we are.
Recently I worked with a man who is seventy and retiring from his profession. What beckoned him—promising peace, stepping down from the pressures, offering freedom to pursue his interests—has proved to be rather problematic after all. It seems that in the decades of faithfully serving the expectations of his family, his church, his profession, he has essentially lost contact with his own needs, his own instinctual reality. Like so many people I meet, he does not feel an essential permission to be who he is, desire what he wants, and pursue what the soul wants. How incredible is this fact that a person can live a productive life, be approved of by family and culture, and have achieved every conscious goal, and still have no “permission.”
Is not this issue pretty general among us? When we are young we are fully persuaded that we are in charge of our lives, and plunging toward our appointed destiny. We cannot afford to have too many doubts; therefore, forward always! Concomitantly, we grow identified with our roles—as partner, parent, and provider. Later, we may question why, if we have served those roles faithfully, they may not have reciprocally served us. Later, we may gain enough strength, or feel desperate enough, to question, to look back and to ask, “Just who am I apart from those roles?” “Who am I apart from my history and my assigned script?” Or we may ask, “Why am I here, really?” Then we are often disconcerted to realize that we do not know the answer to those deepest questions. Frequently, we do not know who we are, what we are doing, or in service to what. Only rarely do we realize that somewhere along the way we lost psychological “permission” to be who we really are.