Learning to be a 'Nowhere Man' can allow us to embrace opportunity

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by Erin Rafalowski
on Monday, May 04, 2009

By Jonathon Flaum, MEANING AT WORK for Asheville Citizen-Times

Published March 1, 2009

In 1965 John Lennon was working on completing the songs for the Beatles' latest album, "Rubber Soul."

He felt utterly dry when his old tricks in phrasing a new song were escaping him. He finally stopped and gave up. But as legend has it, his unconscious did not give up. The conscious will surrendered its power to a larger consciousness, one not dictated by goal.

Lennon's five hours between giving up and receiving the song in "one full gulp" were spent "doing nothing," and "Nowhere Man" was born. It was the first Beatles song to deal with the existential. It was a song that changed them and us:

Doesn't have a point of view
Knows not where he's going to
Isn't he a bit like you and me?
Nowhere man, please listen
You don't know what you're missing
Nowhere man, the world is at your command

In today's economy there are a lot of nowhere men (and women) being born every day.

To lose a job in this culture is like losing one's identity. It is like stepping out of the skin of our comfort, our role. This can be frightening. For a long-time veteran of a single company, it can be downright terrifying - not just financially, but existentially.

But I would like to offer another view, based in part on Lennon's insistence, "You don't know what you're missing ... the world is at your command." And at a deeper level, this view is based on Thich Nhat Hanh's (a Vietnamese Zen Master and poet) interpretation of Rinzai's (a ninth century Chinese Zen Master) idea of the "businessless person." Hanh presents the ideas in his book "Nothing to Do; Nowhere to Go."

In our contemporary business culture, to be a "nowhere man" is suspect. We measure ourselves on how busy we are, how productive and how "connected."

When the buzz of busyness stops and we lose the nexus that helped to create, sustain and manage our external face to the world - our job - we feel as if we are falling. How can we look at this fall as an opportunity rather than an end? When the feeling of falling commences, we can consciously stop the impulse to "save" ourselves through frantically trying to create a new external role/identity overnight. We can choose to feel the experience of what it is to be a "nowhere man" and not panic.

We can use the gap of time to become more intimately acquainted with the man under the skin of external projection. Like a snake, we can experience not simply the death of our old skins but the birth of new ones.

We have to trust that dynamic experience is always in operation and that cycles are in play with us just as in the natural world. An end of one thing always marks the beginning of another, if we pay attention.

But to meet this opportunity we mustn't panic or grasp. We have to practice allowing feelings of anxiety and pain to be there without acting on them. Just feel them until they fade and some new feeling begins to emerge. Being afraid of anxiety is a sure way to prolong it; feel it completely and it will eventually pass. Once you do, you can begin to feel the internal depth that you have and see how you want to manifest it in your next external role.

As Lennon himself experienced, "Nowhere man, the world is at your command." It is at your command precisely because you no longer have to be stuck by a company, job or context. You are now free to create your own.

Freedom is frightening at first blush, and when not chosen it can feel like a burden. But going deeper and seeing a job loss another way is an opportunity for growth, evolution and internal power. The fruits of this practice will extend far beyond this economic downturn. They will extend to all of life, where loss is inevitable and as human beings it is demanded of us that we learn how to work skillfully with it.

Content Source: www.citizen-times.com

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About the Author - Erin Rafalowski

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