What does a Maverick Bluestocking Really Want?

Back on the Spiritual Badass topic today. We’ve been asked:

1) If I did NOTHING different, what would my life be like in 10 years? Will I be happy with that?

2) What kinds of life would I really like to create? Who do I have to be and how do I need to show up in the World to vibrate at the level of my new Magical Life?

Hmm? What do I want to do/be? How might things turn out? Like most of us, I have been asking those questions most of my life.

As a little girl, I wanted to be a writer. I saw myself spending my days making up stories, putting my thoughts into words and enjoying the peace and solitude. I saw bookshops with my own books on their shelves.

By the time I was a teenager, I had put away those silly thoughts (as I had decided they were) and set my sights on being a speech therapist. My grandmother had suffered a stroke and I was fascinated by the work of the women who helped her. I also liked the mixture of science and language that seemed to be involved, along with helping others.

That didn’t last long. When I ended up at Cambridge reading English, I flirted again briefly with the idea of being a writer but spending all my time reading great literature made me think that I could never aspire to anything so wonderful so I put those dreams away again. I decided that if my results were incredibly spectacular I would become an academic. They weren’t incredibly spectacular, just very good. So I became a librarian.

Being a librarian wasn’t quite exciting enough, even though I was working for London University and meeting lots of clever people, and working with computers as early as 1985. So I migrated to journalism. I didn’t think I had anything to say for myself so I worked for a publishing company and wrote about science and technology. Life interrupted in the shape of my own issues and my first divorce.

I then worked in junior management for a large food manufacturer for several years, without ambition. I just tried to make ends meet and survive. I tried to hide the fact that I had been to such a good university and got such a good degree so that I wouldn’t look like ‘a failure.’

Around the time my son was born I started a small business with my then husband. We worked all week, running training courses for IT professionals. It was incredibly stressful but I saw it as a way to secure a better future. Looking after the staff, doing the marketing and running the cashflow, as well as trying to look after a home and family, meant that there was no time to just be me. The business went bankrupt due to outside influences. It felt like disaster at the time but now I am grateful it happened.

It took me a year or so to recover from that but then I decided to go back to university to become a lawyer. Two years of intense study were followed by two years training on the job before I could qualify. I was a single parent of a little boy by this time. And this time I really knew that I was investing for my (our) future. I would be able to get a good job that would use my intellect and qualifications and provide that elusive thing we call ‘security.’

Guess what, that didn’t happen, Life intervened again, this time in the shape of my own ill health and my son’s individual needs. I became a freelance and now work part time. I see my professional work as a job rather than a career. It’s an incredible privilege to work with my clients and to contribute in the way that I do, but it’s a long way from the dream I had when I was studying and training. *

Now I combine that work with writing and caring for my family members (and myself) and I am preparing to launch a practice teaching Mind Calm Meditation.

What do I want from the future? I’m not sure.

How would I like things to turn out? I’m not sure.

My career so far has shown me that my plans and wants rarely turn out the way I have hoped and usually that is a good thing. Sometimes the thing I wanted so much has turned out to be a situation so uncomfortable or damaging that I have needed to escape from it.

These days my wants for the future are far more abstract. I want to continue to grow, and I hope to be able to contribute. I want to live a long, long time. Of course I want the best, and the minimum of suffering, for my loved ones.

But far more than all of that, I want to live in this moment as fully as I can. I want to remember, as much as possible, that I am alive. To be as awake as I can. To shed what isn’t really me and to sink more deeply into being my real self.

If I continue doing what I am doing now, I expect that these wishes may well happen. As for what my life will look like from the outside, who knows? There are sure to be disasters, because that is how life is made, but some of those will turn out to be blessings. If I am lucky enough still to be here in 10 years’ time (I will be nearly 62) I hope that I will be more conscious, more alive, more accepting, less attached, more loving. But far more important than my hopes for the future is my experience now. If I am conscious, alive, accepting, detached and loving right now, the future will take care of itself.

This is just my experience, informed significantly by the roller-coaster career that I have described. I have had to stop thinking in terms of traditional success and failure and to stop setting goals and intentions in conventional ways. This doesn’t mean I don’t have dreams, but I remind myself not to be attached to my dreams, and not to believe that a dreamed of future really is the best one I could have. What an exciting adventure!

* If you wanted to look me up on the Law Society’s Roll of Solicitors, you would have to search for Harriet Balcombe, which is my current legal name and the one I practise law under. The Solicitors’ Regulation Authority wants me to make that clear.