I was cycling over the Golden Gate Bridge in the summer fog, and had this memory of a game I invented seven years ago.
A game I’m finally playing…(sigh!).
It’s a memory of a day at a conference in Toronto in May 2017, sitting on the end of a row in a windowless hotel ballroom, the main room at a conference focused on infrastructure, with renewable energy a key theme that year. My work in raising money for investments in waste management, renewables and sustainable agriculture funds was finally starting to canter, after years labouring in a slow trot.
But my eyes were glazed over at the speakers’ slides and jargon, even though for a decent part of me this area of finance was as interesting as it gets. My stomach was whining at the two mini-danish pastry chaser I had given it on top of a half-pour of dank conference coffee (I would always cave in to the baked goods lined up at the break tables by afternoon day two at these conferences…). And my whole body just felt limp at the vibe of the room.
I felt drained…
I would be working pretty hard before these conferences to prepare for the days there, writing high volumes of emails to key people attending over the days before. Once you were on the plane and got a car to the venue, the tempo didn’t stop, except for those moments sitting down in the speaking sessions. And that was always a sign of failure, in a sense too, for the hungry capital raiser. When it was going really well, you were always in the corridors and mingling areas, connecting with as many people as you could and trying to be sincere in every conversation too.
I always think that feeling physically depleted is easy to cope with, or fix. But this was a different kind of deplete.
I felt drained and depleted in spirit, and I hated that.
Drained with that ghost-like feeling of not being fully ‘there’ in some way. Weathered with years of holding quiet inside me this sense that work wasn’t sparking up my fullest engagement, for some reason – even though I loved the team I was on and what our investments were doing for the world. Hyper sensitive to hearing that old chestnut of guru and fatherly advice: “life is short…”, “you only get one life…” etc.
For some reason, the conference days were the hardest days of this quiet reckoning. Harder than working late back at the office, under deadline on a proposal. Harder than getting up at 4am to catch a flight that would roll you into five back-to-back meetings in a steaming hot American city on a summer’s day.
But I remember this moment in that conference in May 2017 because of what happened next, that provoked oozing out of that drained spirit, and starting to shift into this wonderful daydream. And a question. A question whose answer I’m only just playing with now…
I remember sitting there, and looking around slowly at other glazed faces, and half the seats empty. And I remember my mind starting to expand into picturing all the different conferences going on around the world at that very moment. Fascinating conferences on technology, or exercise science, or leadership in teams, or the making of music, or the existence of God.
And as the speakers debated optimal capital structure for renewable energy project financing, all my ears could hear was this colorful symphony of conversation being conducted in my head, fantasizing as to what might be the most fascinating conference going on in the world right now.
What room did I want to be in, instead?
Some room in which I’d sit there utterly gripped in the content of talks. Ebulliently inspired by the people I would meet in the coffee breaks between sessions. Giddy with the ideas and action lists that would be spilling from my brain by the time I’d slump into bed after the evening parties…
But, sitting there in that conference room in May 2017, in Toronto, I wasn’t in that kind of room.
I was in an impressive room to part of me, the part of me that felt ‘proud’ of how the arc of my career had developed to be in that room.
I was in a room that had me feeling drained in spirit, jaded with sitting in the ‘dissonance’ of giving even one more hour to not living my fullest self and spirit at work, for some reason. Deplete with my curiosity not being fully filled, for whatever reason. (Have you ever noticed how you can’t fake curiosity?). Fed up with the ache of time passing by while I sat and accepted it all, and kept choosing to sit there. And this was seven years ago…
What room, instead?
Finally, seven years and two months later, I’m salivating every day at playing the game, and deciding what rooms I want to be in over the months to come. Finally seeing that listening to intuition can be slow, but as long as we’re listening….
With so much safely provided in being born into this modern age, how is it that we can put up with not reaching higher in our curiosity and ability to create the richest work lives?
How is it that we can accept life spending days and months and years living with the feeling of doing work where we’re ‘not all there’.
Yes, we can’t always walk around in ebullient spirit, all day long of every day, and always be in a fascinating room, every hour of every day.
But in our work in particular, we can always be noticing the rooms we are in, and how they make us feel, and when we know deep inside that we don’t fully want to be there.
What room do I want to be in, instead?
Playing with this question means then we can then do something little, or something large, that shifts our path to the rooms we do want to be in.
Because the time we get in our lives is simply our level of that listening, and our rate of the learning that comes with it.
“The point of life is to become who you are having discovered what that is”
– Pindar, Ancient Greek lyrical poet
So, you might think about ‘what room?’, too.
Are you in the rooms you want to be in?
What rooms do you no longer want to be in? What rooms do you need to show up in less, too?
What little things today can you do, even in the tiniest way, to have one toe on the path to being in the room you’d just love to be in?
