In between the worlds (or why the way we work is evolving)

The generation I belong to (people in their 30ties and 40ties, even 50ties) seems to have a fascinating task at hand, to do with bridging two different worlds. This in obvious ways impacts how we relate to our working lives. Many of us refuse to engage in traditional career progression model and create businesses or portfolio careers which give us more freedom and opportunity to discern what feels meaningful as our lives evolve. The roots behind these decisions run deep. 

As I sense into this from a wide, sociological perspective, I can’t help but look at our heritage which includes the trauma of the two world wars, the holocaust and other globally significant events of the XX century our parents and grandparents were unable to process, and for good reasons. Above all, having survived, they wanted to create a life worth living. I remember interviewing my late grandmother on my mother’s side for an essay I wrote at high school. This fabulous woman, the root of the tree of my closest family, had most incredible stories to tell. Born in 1920 in Lviv (part of Polish territory at the time), she was raised and educated like a princess. At the age of 19, just as she passed her school finishing exam and was about to commence a law degree, she lost virtually everything, as her entire world collapsed in front of her. Her mother fell ill and died while her father and brother emigrated to Hungary, leaving her behind, at the mercy of friends. As part of Polish intelligentsia, she was sought after by the Bolsheviks to be taken to one of the camps in Siberia and exterminated. Trying to escape those who were hunting her, in deep terror she knocked on doors of different friends of hers often to be told “I’m sorry but they have already been here to ask about you, you can’t stay with us”. On one occasion she hid in a big bread oven that belonged to her friend’s family of bakers. White fat worms crawled all over her in the darkness (amongst all the stories she told me somehow this image stayed imprinted on my memory with most clarity). Up till her nineties, she would wake up in the middle of the night, shivering, and sit up in her bed telling herself the war was over. The essay I wrote, an interview with Joanna Polanowska, finished with the sentence she said looking me straight in the eye: “The most important thing is that we have survived.”

I remember the first time I realised the impact of her legacy on my life and how a part of me was in a way still living her, and her generation’s, story. It was during a hypnosis session in London, after one of the waves of depression hit me hard again. When in a relaxed state I saw her face, clearly, and understood not in my mind but at a level of sensation in my body, that over my whole young life I’ve aspired to be her. The brave survivor. The one worthy of life, and love because of the atrocities they’d been through. “My old age is made of silk”, she used to say, which is an old age Polish idiom expressing the preciousness of something. Young folks wouldn’t say this anymore, just as young folks in my family no longer remember grandma’s stories. As I saw her face in a hypnotic vision, I realised I was living the life of an independent, super ambitious woman in business she couldn’t have had (but was more than equipped to, with her qualities and talents). What also rose to the surface of my perception was the subconscious habit to seek my worthiness through surviving crisis, as an extension of her and a tribute to her.  

I sense that many of us feel this burden - to live the calm, prosperous, somewhat uneventful (but secure!) lives our parents and grandparents couldn’t have lived and so did all they could to create the right setup for us to be able to. By doing this, in their world, they gave us the most generous gift possible. And so, understandably, they feel truly upset when we are “wasting” it. But those are not the lives that we, the in-betweenrs, are called to live. We start successful careers, some of us get married, some of us conceive new life, only to feel the emptiness howling within. We stay bound to the responsibilities of “normal life”, ignoring the howl and pushing it down out of sense of duty to our families, or we drop everything and go, trying to chase our truth wherever it may be hiding. We travel the world, we do a hundred personal development or spiritual workshops, we spend all the money earned doing our “proper” jobs. We find ourselves, we lose ourselves, we suffer and we laugh. We dance naked under the stars, by the fire in forest clearings, to a drum beat or the fragrant silence of the night. We go on antidepressants, we quit antidepressants. We take plant medicines in the jungles of South America. We put frog poison on our bodies to feel more alive. Some of us check out forever, in the middle of that search, or even before we had a chance to embark on it. Jumping under the tube in London at 5.30 am on a weekday, on the way to the City, in our stock broker suits, for example. 

Most of us carry on, in a more or less conscious way. From time to time we meet people younger than us, in their early twenties, sometimes late teens, and we gasp. “How the hell…?”. People who no longer need to repeat our journeys, and have the degree of freedom, connection and alignment many of us struggle to attain after years and decades of chasing our truth. For the collective consciousness is shifting, in some environments quicker than in others, without a shadow of a doubt. I have heard of a child, a few years old, who refused to live with her parents, always arguing but committed to stay together until she became a young adult, so she can have a “good” childhood. She told them to sort their relationship out, this way or other, while she’s moving in with her grandmother as she refuses to live in pure hell their family life has become. It won’t be long, I feel, before more children start to teach us what it means to be adults. The world is changing, and a lot of us feel that we’re in the middle of that change and in between two paradigms, confused, bewildered, fascinated.