Being the Best You Can Be

Carl Jung wrote:

“Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life. Worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and our ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie.”

What does this mean? I think it is a koan — “a message that confounds a stubborn mind until it finds deeper levels of insight.”

Jung’s koan is nudging me. Here, now, in the twilight of my afternoon. What “truths and ideals” have come with me`?

Thinking about this eventually spotlighted the fact that when most “truths and ideals” get activated, two personal characteristics operate alongside them. First, “be the best that you can be” which I learned in school and the military. Second, “be productive” which I learned in business. The way I learned these during my morning was intense (“always on, 24/7/365”). This resulted in a “driven life.”

This life was an accumulation of doing what I was supposed to do according to the culture I grew up in: go to school, join the military, go back to school, join the rat race, get ahead, get involved, make enough money, all with an overarching but less-skilled commitments to marriage and children, all bathed in the background radiation of childhood family and religion.

This required a “be the best you can be” kind of life. This was based on a premise that one can always do better if one pushes, or is pushed, hard enough. Productivity is the predominant measure of accomplishment.

So I pushed and was pushed. Beyond my comfort level. That is what one does in a rat race. I learned this and it generally served its purpose.

But it hung on afterward. Now, on the cusp of the evening of my life, I cannot shake off a feeling of being “driven.”

Daily, I am still driven by a “to do” list weighted with “be all that I can be” projects, and I measure how productive I am by checking things off.

My afternoon situation was mainly a climb-the-corporate-ladder thing. But many people, whatever they do, at some point feel their lives have become “driven.” Some are looking for an off-ramp. Not to a rest stop but to slower paced road.

“What is great in the morning will be little at evening.” Jung tells me that I no longer must be productive nor be the best—certainly not in the way I learned them to propel me in the military and business world.

The problem is that my workaholic habits are so deeply ingrained that they are “always on.” Turning off the lights in my office did not dim my thirst for more.

To go deeper means directly facing what it means to be my “productive best” in ways that are appropriate to my evening road and not the road behind me.

Simply put, I am having a tough time not being the best I can be for all the projects I put on my plate. Ironically, starting this blog is an example of the problem.

Captain Obvious says “You do not have to do what you want to do.” It is about making choices.