Notes and highlights for Beck, Martha. The Way of Integrity: Finding the path to your true self . Little, Brown Book Group.
The word integrity has taken on a slightly prim, judgmental nuance in modern English, but the word comes from the Latin integer, which simply means “intact.” To be in integrity is to be one thing, whole and undivided. When a plane is in integrity, all its millions of parts work together smoothly and cooperatively. If it loses integrity, it may stall, falter, or crash. There’s no judgment here. Just physics.
When you experience unity of intention, fascination, and purpose, you live like a bloodhound on a scent, joyfully doing what feels truest in each moment.
Stage One: The Dark Wood Of Error
Chapter 1: Lost in the Woods
The Divine Comedy begins in the middle. “Midway through the journey of our life,” says Dante, “I found myself in a dark forest, for the right way was lost.” He doesn’t mention how he got to the woods, what he was doing when he wandered off track, or how far he’s gone.
The experience of noticing we’re on the wrong path, in what feels like the wrong life, comes to almost all of us at some point.
The most common reason we end up feeling this way is by doing what we’re “supposed to.” We learn from our culture how a good person is supposed to behave, and we behave that way. Then we expect the promised rewards: happiness, health, prosperity, true love, solid self – esteem. But the equation fails to balance. Even after doing everything we can to be good, we don’t feel good. Confused, we figure we’re somehow not doing enough, or not doing it the right way. But the harder we work at finding the path to well – being, the less well we feel.
There have probably been times when you, too, have departed from your own true path. At first, the resulting suffering may have been so mild you didn’t even notice it.
Eventually, if we don’t correct course, we begin displaying clusters of characteristic symptoms. It’s the way our instincts motivate us to regain our integrity.
I’ll describe the symptoms of this syndrome:
Feeling purposeless
In modern Western culture, most of us believe that we can find a sense of purpose by achieving something.
Some people think purpose means having a corner office. Others try to become movie stars, save the rain forests, or make viral videos of their pet hamsters.
Any of these ambitions might actually match your true purpose. If so, you’ll feel a powerful inward compulsion to follow that particular path. You’ll find the steps along the way fascinating and fulfilling, and as a result you’ll be good at them.
But if you pursue any course of action solely because other people think it’s “purposeful,” prepare to hit dense fog. You’ll encounter baffling failures. You won’t get along with people. You won’t be able to drum up the energy to climb the success ladder — or for that matter, to wash your hair. Maybe you’re thinking, “Well, of course I feel awful — I never get the things I want!” If so, I wish you could meet the people I know who’ve reached the pinnacle of our society’s idealized achievements, only to realize that, as one woman told me, “There’s no there there. I thought there was a position in the world that would make me feel good, but I got to that position and didn’t find anything that made me happy.
“So I won an Olympic gold,” one client told me. “And as I climbed down from the podium, the only thought I could think was, ‘ What the hell do I do now? ’ It was awful, absolutely terrifying.
Our sense of purposelessness doesn’t disappear in the face of culturally defined achievements. It remains a persistent, goading force, a biting fly that won’t stop buzzing around our heads until we begin pursuing goals that truly fulfill us — in other words, following the way of integrity.
Emotional misery
Neediness, panic, depression. Welcome to a few of the emotional states that may jump you as you wander through the dark wood of error. When I stray from my integrity, the mood-monsters rear up almost immediately. One step away from my truth, I feel grasping, nervous, and morose.
Whenever you lose your integrity, you’ll feel your own unique brew of bad moods, depending on your personality. You may tend, as I do, toward anxiety and depression. Or you may feel free-floating hostility, itching to punch everyone in your office, family, zip code.
The sooner you acknowledge this the better, because remaining in the dark wood of error may eventually cause you actual, physical harm.
Physical deterioration
Obviously, bad health can affect people who live in total integrity.
But from what I’ve seen, it’s rare for someone who’s internally split not to develop some kind of health problem.
Consistent relationship failures
It’s simple logic: if you don’t walk your true path, you don’t find your true people. You end up in places you don’t like, learning skills that don’t fulfill you, adopting values and customs that feel wrong. The folks you meet along the way either genuinely love these things, or they’re faking it as hard as you are. Either way, your connection with them will be artificial.
If you feel persistently disconnected and lonely, you’re almost certainly (innocently) out of integrity. This goes double if you feel trapped with people you absolutely can’t stand.
We simply can’t chart a course to happiness by linking up with others who are as lost as we are.
Consistent career failures
Your true self is intensely interested in your real life’s work — but it could give a rat’s ass about anything else. When you pursue a career that pulls you away from your true self, your talent and enthusiasm will quit on you like a bored intern. Every task will feel as distasteful as poisoned food, and leave you just as weak.
I’ve met dozens of people who’ve gone into engineering because they loved inventing things, or academia because they loved learning, or journalism because they loved writing, and then got promoted into management or administration — which they hated.
Our culture defines “success” as rising through bureaucracies, so these people didn’t understand why they’d suddenly gone from high performance to crashing and burning.
It is because they had split themselves by aspiring to do things that, at another level, they knew they hated.
There are infinite ways to make a living. At some level — a deep, instinctive level — you know which of them will truly work for you. You can feel it immediately when a job requires you to push aside your true desires. Your awareness of your true career path may be buried deep under layers of acculturated false beliefs, but it’s still there.
Chapter 2: Desperate for Success
“If whatever you’re doing isn’t working, don’t do it harder.”
The problem isn’t how hard you’re working, it’s that you’re working on things that aren’t right for you. Your goals and motivations aren’t harmonizing with your deepest truth. They didn’t come from your own natural inclinations. They came from the two forces that drive us all off our true paths: trauma and socialization.
By “trauma” I mean any painful experience that makes us feel blindsided and out of our depth. Being shamed by our parents or schoolmates can be traumatic. So can a financial downturn, an intense argument, the loss of a pet. Often our response to such events is to change our behavior to avoid repeating the experience.
I see Mount Delectable as a symbol of all the ways to be “better” that we learn from our cultural context. For most people, this involves money: piles and piles of money.
Trying to climb the mountain of “better” almost always involves huge amounts of exhausting labor, when we’re already dead tired.
Even when I reached some of my target base-camps, it never made me feel better for more than a few days.
An almost universal dark-wood error is believing that happiness will arrive when we’re above others in some socially defined way.
People’s wants are as widely divergent as their social conditioning. They want different kinds of clothes, houses, experiences, relationships. But they all yearn for just a few things, and those things are remarkably consistent, even among people from very different cultures. They include peace, freedom, love, comfort, and belonging. Here’s what I’ve noticed: if you spend your life pursuing culturally defined goals (climbing Mount Delectable), you may manage to get what you want, but you probably won’t get what you yearn for. If you choose to leave Mount Delectable behind, you might not get what you want in that socially driven, craving kind of way. But you won’t care, because your entire world will fill up — pressed down, shaken together, and running over, as the Good Book says — with all the things for which you yearn. And here is how to leave Mount Delectable behind: stop with the hustle.
Humans are so tuned in to cultural values that once we start craving our way up Mount Delectable, we may go completely blind to our own real desires. We can’t lose our true nature, since it’s in our DNA, but we can divide ourselves from it to get better at various cultural games.
Definitions of “Hustle”:
- Have the courage, confidence, self – belief, and self – determination to go out there and work it out until you find the opportunities you want in life.
- Force (someone) to move hurriedly in a specified direction.
- Coerce or pressure someone into doing or choosing something.
- Engage in prostitution.
- Obtain by illicit action; swindle; cheat.
You can see a portrait of modern Western culture in this single word. Our social definition of “success” is all about hustle. We must rise above others, and that entails: (1) embodying confidence and self – determination, (2) going very fast, (3) pressuring other people into doing what we want, (4) selling ourselves, and (5) swindling and cheating. That, my friend, is how to climb Mount Delectable.
You probably assume at a deep, unarticulated level, that to climb up to a happier place in life, you have no alternative but to join the hustle. Anything you do solely to influence others, rather than to express your true nature, is a hustle. Being polite to get approval is a hustle. Flirting with people to make them feel special is a hustle.Wearing certain clothes because you want to look professional, or sexy, or hip, or rich, or tall, or nonconformist, or demure — hustle, hustle, hustle.
Mind you, hustling doesn’t mean you’re bad. It means you’re well socialized, cooperating beautifully with culture. But it also means you’re split from your true nature.
Think about three or four things you’ve done during the past week.
Choose one that, in hindsight, seems relatively pleasant.
Carefully remember how you felt as you undertook this activity. Were you buoyed up, delighted, as you anticipated doing it? Once you got started, did you genuinely enjoy it? When you finished, were you pleased by the whole process?
Next, recall something you did during the past week that didn’t thrill you. How did you feel, physically and emotionally, as you approached the task? How did you feel while doing it — depressed, tired, confused, annoyed, distracted?
Try toggling back and forth between these two sensations. Even if the difference is slight, notice it carefully. This is the difference between doing something from integrity and doing something to conform with a cultural hustle.
Considering the two activities you’ve just used above, notice that there’s only one reason you did the unpleasant thing: at some level you thought you had to. Maybe you did it out of fear, dreading what would happen if you didn’t. Maybe you were trying to please someone.
Immanuel Kant’s unspeakably dull masterwork, The Critique of Pure Reason:
Kant believed that our minds create all our experience, including space and time. There may be a reality out there, but we can perceive it only through the filter of our subjective perceptions, which means that no one can ever know what’s absolutely true.
This theory is also mind-blowingly paradoxical: it’s absolutely true that nothing is absolutely true, including this statement.
I’m not saying that your efforts to fulfill cultural standards are bad. Quite the opposite. You’re doing a Herculean job of living up to standards you truly believe are right and good. I admire that very much. It takes incredible self – discipline to go against your nature.
But I do want you to notice one thing: Whenever you go against your true nature to serve your culture, you freaking hate it.
I encourage you to go right on living your life exactly as you’ve been doing so far. Keep running your hustle. Run as many hustles as you want. The only change to make at this point on your way of integrity is to admit — just to yourself — that some of your actions are designed to impress or fit in with other people.