CARE OF THE SOUL: Changing Directions

People often refer to the process of becoming a better person as "growth." They go to conferences so they can grow, and they see challenges as opportunities for growth. Years ago I read an essay by James Hillman in which he expressed his distaste for this metaphor. I was convinced and ever since have avoided the word. It tends to be sentimental and doesn't accurately describe what we go through. For one thing, not growing is just as relevant - being stuck, failing, and making mistakes all help a great deal in your becoming a rich and complex person.

I prefer to see personal development as the discovery of a new room in the soul, some area of life that has great potential but has just been found. When I see a person on the threshold of such a turn, I imagine him facing a doorway that he has to enter with some courage and abandon. It might be a new self that is being offered as an expansion or complexifying of who he is. This is not growth, not a steady evolution; rather, it's a turn, an angular move in a new direction.

You see this kind of change in dreams, when the dreamer finds herself in a land, a house, or a room that she has never before seen. I once dreamed I was walking cautiously through a house under construction. You sense it when the dreamer is afraid of a door left ajar or just being opened. You glimpse it when the dreamer encounters a person speaking a foreign language or when she is speaking a language that she has always wanted to learn - or has never even heard of. I sometimes wishfully speak Italian in my dreams.

But the appearance in life of a new possibility, the hint of a new self, can be challenging, frightening, and confusing. In defense, you may retreat into familiar territory and strengthen your old habits. If the invitation to new life has to do with a career change, you may get more education in the old one and protect yourself from life's flow by cementing the status quo. As you reach for safety, the new idea still may keep its attraction. You may take minor steps in its direction. You send for a brochure about the new career or take a workshop, thinking that you're really making a strong move. In fact, you have no idea that a creative mess lies in your future as you discover new vitality.

You resist, because subliminally you know that the structures you have so laboriously put in place - a job, a marriage, family harmony, money - will be threatened by new vitality. You probably don't realize that feeling alive, not being depressed, and using your time on earth well require change and loss. As the religious traditions advise, life is always a mixture of creativity and destruction. 

What is required more than anything in choosing life over death is self-confrontation - facing your fears and resistances, sorting out all the emotions and possibilities and relationships, which then allows you to make a move and complete the turn. You may have to face the fact that you have a long and abiding anger or that you are inwardly roiling with envy or jealousy. These emotions may hinder your move into new life, and so you have to acknowledge them, feel them, and let them work on you. There is usually a big price to pay for entry into a new room of the soul.

D. H. Lawrence wrote a powerful poem about building your ship of death, but it's also your task to build your edifice of a self, a container that is up to date and in good condition for the vitality that life offers you. If you are a one-room building, you probably feel cramped, blocked, and depressed. You may not need to grow but to complexify.

For a long time in my own life, I tried to avoid the room of the soul that had a sign on it that read "Parenthood." I argued convincingly with friends that it was not in my imagination to have children. Then my stepson appeared, and then my daughter. It has been a very good room in which to dwell. I didn't grow into being a father; I took a sharp turn in my life and built an addition.

Dreams don't say much about growing, but they show all kinds of ways to keep adding to your home. The expansion requires imagination, risk, cost, and creativity, but its reward is a deeply satisfying way of life. You will have the structure and emotional environment in which to thrive.

Thomas Moore's new book isspan class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;" A Life's Work: The Joy of Discovering What You Were Born to Do (Random House, February 2008). See careofthesoul.net.