Part Two of the Women Who Dare To Be Wild series.
You may find yourself asking, “Why should I dare to be wild? What’s really in it for me?” This is not a simple answer, and it’s not one I can answer for you. I know I haven’t really told you what I believe wild to mean. First, I want to show you where wild is not. In assisting you in feeling the void, it may motivate you to look within for your own wildness.
If you aren’t wary you may just sink into a dull life.
“What is a dull life,” you ask. It is less of a specific way of living and more of a feeling state. It is when we have made our lives small in one way or another.
Examples Of Dullness…
Our lives become dull when we get into a career where the topics being discussed are rigid, defining, and grounded in reason. If there is no space for unanswered questions the hard ones don’t get discussed, leading to the fallacy that humans can know everything. It may feel like something is missing, but we do not know what it is. Mystery and imagination lie in the unanswerable questions.
Our lives become dull when we have too much structure. We get up a specific time, do the same exercise every day, follow specific procedures at work, cook similar meals every day, etc. If there is no time for spontaneity or creativity, where is the fun in living?
Our lives become dull when we don’t look within us for guidance but instead ask everyone else, and attempt to follow other people’s footsteps toward the “good life”. Do you think you could have the answer to that decision you’ve been trying to make or that career you’ve been holding back on?
Our lives become dull when we don’t have any grounding beliefs or stories in the invisible, in spirit. We worship money, status, and obtaining material things. These don’t sustain us though. Where are the stories and beliefs that keep us going, that light us up, and hint toward the truth about life? What we worship guides us in life.
“We dull our lives by the way we conceive them.” –James Hillman
Our lives become dull because of the stories we tell about our lives and how we perceive them. It’s like when we simplify our lives either to make sense of them or to try to share them with others we leave out so much. We reduce our lives to the moments and events that occurred in the past. Or we reduce life to rites of passage, to accomplishments, to perceived events that you believe say something about yourself.
But get this…. Your life will never only be what you say it is and at the same time, it is whatever you say it is. I imagine this to be like this analogy of the moon: someone is pointing to the moon and saying the moon is round, white and very far away. This is not really the moon, though. You are attempting to describe the moon, but your descriptions are not the actual moon. This is the same with your life.
If this is true, then why not tell better stories? Why not tell stories that try to grapple with a feeling we have or with the beauty we experience? We can see our lives through multiple colored lenses and make them interesting.
When I read James Hillman’s book, The Soul’s Code, I lit up when he said we are missing a romantic flair in how we imagine our lives. Maybe it is just me, possibly from my time in the military or from my time studying psychology, but I attempt to simplify my life in order to dissect and analyze it. When I do this, I totally ignore the wildness that is in me and flowing through me, the wildness that is connecting me to other people and situations and ideas and movements and moments.
I believe I do this in an effort to understand myself at a deeper level. And isn’t this something we all want more of? But, when I am only using one mode of knowing (thinking) to understand myself, I am only understanding myself through one lens. I am only knowing myself through rationalization, by dissecting and categorizing “so-called facts” about my life.
By no means am I saying to drop the career that is grounded in intellectual ideas or remove all structure from your life. I suggest though, that you look at your life and see if any of these examples are ringing true in you. So we can continue our journey into uncovering, unleashing, and reviving the wild in your life.
In case you missed part I.
Check out the rest of the posts in this series.