“What if You Woke Up One Morning and Realized You Were Living the Wrong Life?”
All of us dream from time to time of overhauling our lives; of shedding the old self, with its tired habits, complacency, and disillusionment, and taking on some utterly different, more focused and fulfilled life. Bruce Grierson, authored a book titled, U-Turns: What if You Woke Up One Morning and Realized You Were Living the Wrong Life?(Bloombury, Apr. 2007. 352p)
Grierson examines people who have experienced a conversion, an epiphany, a paradigm shift, an awakening, and these life-altering reversals his title calls “U-turns.” He considers the stories of more than 300 people who made such changes. He shares dozens of cases of these reversals: retail executives who suddenly turn into committed anti-consumerist activists, the politician who switches parties and a Wall Street bond trader who drops everything one day and moves their family to a farm on the Canary Islands. Others in humbler quarters routinely do the same: the ad executive who becomes a media critic, the prosecutor who becomes a social worker, an army lawyer “charged with prosecuting homosexual soldiers” devotes the rest of his life to defending homosexuals against prosecution and the butcher who becomes a vegan. I add Bill Gates who is spending less time earning money than giving it away and pulling other billionaires into the deep end of global philanthropy with him.
“What if it seemed YOU were living the wrong life?”
Do you keep living it or do you follow the “brain in your gut” and get another life? There are those who chucked families, fortunes, power, and prestige and others in the crunch who turned 180 degrees and chose paths different than the ones they were on. Gauguin, Apostle Paul, Gandhi, Rosa Parks, Cassius Clay and Malcolm X, — but many are unknown. These turnarounds may be secular, political, and religious. Some work out well, others don’t.
Eckhart Toller, in 1977, at the age of 29, after having suffered from long periods of suicidal depression, says he experienced an “inner transformation”. He woke up in the middle of the night, suffering from feelings of depression that were “almost unbearable”. Tolle says of the experience,
“I couldn’t live with myself any longer. And in this a question arose without an answer: who is the ‘I’ that cannot live with the self? What is the self? I felt drawn into a void. I didn’t know at the time that what really happened was the mind-made self, with its heaviness, its problems, that lives between the unsatisfying past and the fearful future, collapsed. It dissolved. The next morning I woke up and everything was so peaceful. The peace was there because there was no self. Just a sense of presence or “beingness”, just observing and watching.”
Others results are wrenching, some are baffling and a few are downright alarming. Grierson shares commentary from philosophers, psychologists, researchers and theoreticians to his discussion of personal change. Some stories crumble under scrutiny.
Daily someone experiences a wake-up call. They sense they have gotten things terribly wrong. Somehow, they are on the wrong side. Something” tells them that life can’t go on this way. And so, on moral, or at least deeply personal, grounds, they make a “U-turn”. All of us dream from time to time of overhauling our lives. Of shedding the old self, with its tired habits, complacency, and disillusionment, and taking on some utterly different, more focused and fulfilled identity.
The shift may be sparked by an external event—the collapse of a marriage, the loss of a mentor, a close brush with death a dead end route that leads straight to jail or prison—that sharpens the urge to invest what life remains with meaning. Very few experience the flash of desire for change act on it as Malcolm X did in his transformation from petty criminal to revered African-American leader. With most of us it stops with the dream or thinking.
Often the reversal is simply the result of a private crisis of conscience. One day, after years of uncomfortable mental conflict, you can’t quite meet your eyes in the mirror. You stop. You confront the choices that have taken you slowly or rapidly off course. You defect—blowing up bridges behind you, marching into the arms of a new future sometimes greatly disconnected with the first life. However it comes there are the pregnant moments where a very tiny change in input results in a huge change in output.
I immediately think of the “inevitable” midlife crisis, however, Grierson does away with the concept of the mid-life crisis, I think not convincingly. . He contends the seeds of change are sown long before the actual shift. Although his subjects and most of us like to tell our story as one of a lightning bolt of inspiration with a complex narrative point (for the sake of good storytelling), Grierson sees it as more of a gradual shift in perception. We can think “My God, I’m lost and there’s no hope” or “I’m lost; maybe this is a good time to make a change.”
Although there are exceptions, the U-turner is most often male, usually about 40 and with a substantial income, which seems logical enough. It’s tough to change and easier if you can afford it. I have often said with some humor, “I like to dedicate my life to making plenty of money and at 40 see that as useless, keep the money, but do something that makes for change.” Rick Warren’s book so popular with the Baby-boomers comes to mind. The Purpose Driven Life was selling a million copies a month for a while. Warren said the book was not necessarily for really religious people. He called it a non-denominational book that urges people to explore what they were put on this earth to do. A lot of the Promise Keepers and so on were the ones driving up the book sales but there were people drawn to that idea who weren’t particularly religious. It is a particular hunger for meaning. “What was I put on earth to do? What Should I Do With My Life? Am I exploiting my unique attributes?
Grierson notes that there aren’t many women among the U-turners.
Grierson’s larger mandate in the book becomes clear in the final chapter’s subtitle, “Is America Ripe for a Mass U-Turn?” The premise is that people are vulnerable to massive change in low moments. And you could say that’s its sort of a low moment for America in a lot of ways. America’s classic confidence is wavering a little bit. It is a time of growing instability and those are the moments, at least on a personal level, when people become receptive to change. It is that whole metaphor of gradual change that you cannot detect until it happens. It looks like a sudden phase change but it isn’t.” What role will 9/11 continue to play in our psyche? The housing Bubble burst? The sharp downturn in the market? The lost of jobs? The increase of personal and national debt? How will that change person and America?
Grierson cites Buddha:
“Only by finding and acting on our true calling can we save the world.”
And Gandhi:
“We must be the change we wish to see in the world.”
According to Grierson, it’s possible to save the world only if individuals collectively create a tipping point by embracing “an irresistible truth whose time has come.” I don’t know exactly what that means but I want that hope.
By Gerard Howell
