“They ring the bell, and if you’re lucky, you get the cheese, the crumb from the corporate table,” my client began. He was discouraged, complained of low self-esteem, exhaustion. “The only trouble is, the harder you work, the more you conform, the cheese, the crumb, keeps getting smaller.”

Tom is a talented, sensitive young man, trying to have a piece of the American Dream. Part of the dilemma, for me, is with the dream itself. It used to be that, if I work hard, I can make my dream come true. Now it’s, “I deserve it.” Our life work is no longer the outpouring of our giftedness but the badge of our entitlement. I’m entitled to the prize because I expect it.

Exploring this with Tom, he sinks deeper into his chair. “We want it all, don’t we? We want to love what we do and get all the rewards that are out there. But they promised us! They say, ‘If you behave the way I tell you to behave, I’ll give you the reward, the cheese.’” Tom was angry that the control was all theirs — his time was all theirs. He felt trapped, in a box. “They beat you into submission,” he sighed. “It sucks the life out of me.”

We started talking about his life, where he felt most alive. “The sports part of me is the soul part of me,” he said, his passion beginning to stir. “That’s where I take risks, am a free spirit.” Tom was a surfer. His dream was to one day live at the beach. What he loved about himself had nothing to do with what he did as a living. He leaves his soul at home when he leaves for work.

He began complaining about not being allowed to do anything creative, “original,” in his job, that he does what they tell him to do, that at the end of the day, he feels “used up.”  I shared with him my belief that energy that revitalizes you and opens up even more energy is soul energy, when what you do comes from your passion and aliveness. The rest is will energy, when you will yourself through something. Will energy exhausts and drains you.

We explored images of him surfing through some of the work he presently had to do, feeling the wind and battling surf pull him in directions he didn’t expect. How could he use that energy in his job now? We explored realistic expectations and alternative career options. He said something about “moving my ladder to another wall,” citing the mid-life-crisis metaphor of climbing to the top of the corporate ladder and realizing the ladder has been leaning against the wrong wall all along.

“I have to change my perspective,” he said. “Getting it right, having-it-all is a myth. I’m breathing! That’s the gift!” Tom was realizing that the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow isn’t the gift, that the rainbow colors themselves are the gift. Living is the gift. Creating a meaningful life is the gift.
Our work has to flow out of our fullness. Otherwise it is just about survival, the hunt for that pot of gold we call “security” – something that changes with the whims of the times.

“What would make my heart sing?” he mused, drifting off. “It would probably be something counter cultural to the American Dream, but I really want it. I just don’t know how to get it yet.”
Clarity is the beginning of insight. The rest will come in time.

Tom and I talked some more that day, about his dreams, about the woman with whom he was engaged, about parts of the country he would one day like to live. I think he was beginning to process things in a different way than when he first sat down with me that morning. His energy was beginning to come back. He had connected back up with his imagination. He was breathing.

When Tom got up to leave, he turned to me and smiled. “I get it,” he said. “The only bell that has to ring is inside me.”