the engineer

He sat with spine slouched and chin down, describing a vast black hole in his chest. There was an imminent threat of his being pulled in, sucked into that hole, by the pressure he self-imposes to be like his high-powered colleagues. The terror is in losing himself to a way of being that his peers demonstrate, and I mean all of them. Every single one. They have all lost their soul to their hard-earned dream job, thinking, contemplating, problem solving, fixing, all day during and after work, and even in their night dreams.
” How do I not lose myself without quitting?” “Do I become like everyone else?” “It’s my dream job and I could lose everything that is important to me!” His paralyzing, just on the verge of terror, was real, palpable, and totally disorganizing to his sense of self and it waffled between two distinct and direct messages: On the one hand, ‘If I am different than them, I won’t be accepted’ and on the other the fear shouted, ‘for God’s sake do not lose all you have come to be!’
This was both impersonal and personal for belonging was always a precarious status for the young engineer. The fear was so imposing as his job was earned after the years of study that his parents had insisted on so that he could be a good citizen and earn his belonging in the family. And his fear screamed of his rebellion to claim his right to be in all the ways that he had discovered throughout his life. He did not want to throw the baby out with the bath water so he considered, for the first time, what it would mean to stay at his job where he truly knew that he belonged, while simultaneously ‘not belonging’ to the ways of the work tribe. Oh, this elicited an indescribable threat to his existence and yet he held the paradox gently, maturing right in front of me, from one way of being to another.
Now, I remember my first master teacher describing how one would know that they had transcended karma when a different and new thought naturally rises. For him that thought was ‘I can keep my job and be myself at the same time!’ This sounds incredibly simple and worthy of celebration, however the depth of this new thought had the clout able to rewire his whole inner world.
His spine straightened, his chin lifted, his tears cleared away, and he opened his eyes. Finally, he felt the deep and unrebellious knowing ‘it is safe to be me. I am new, I am!!’