Leave your base camp

“Money often costs too much.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson

Last Tuesday, I found myself in the unusual position of being at the very top and very bottom of Maslow’s Happy Hierarchy of Needs at exactly the same time.

I can’t recall ever being in two places at one time like this, not since 1986 when I was in Scranton with a young Chinese man who was threatening to defect, watching him waver as he decided between two distinctly different worlds.

Typically when I’ve been making a good living, the money has been accompanied by varying degrees of feeling an imposter and, well, feeling more than slightly miserable or oddly disengaged at the same time—like those descriptions of people having out of body experiences while floating above their deathbed. A tad disconcerting given my fear of heights, but mainly just numbing rather than debilitating.

For years I was paid well for work that didn’t connect me to my Self in any real way yet was externally validated and accomplished: books published with an odd sense of disconnect from them, speeches given that further commodified a business speak providing no real value to the world—blah, blah, blah, Fido, blah, blah, blah, Fido—bios that impressed but didn’t feel real somehow, newspaper clippings that mothers collect and laminate so they can whip them out at the beauty shop and class reunions to impress their friends. Oh, sure, good work was done in there; but was it really me doing it, or the surface of me, leaving the inside part to just hang out or hang on, waiting to scale the pyramid?

So here I am now, simultaneously at the pinnacle of self-actualization (The Top) and the depths of “financial creativity” (The Bottom). There’s a simple explanation for that, of course—it takes a while for a new business to take root, but forget the bottom part for the moment, I’ve just never reached that top before now—I got stuck somewhere in the middle for the past 20 years—lots of good stuff in that middle, for sure, but hey, it’s a whole new Mt. Everest that I’ve climbed over the twelve months. It was time to climb further after 20 years of base-camping.

The view from up here, well, it’s spectacular! No wonder those frost-bitten climbers make their way to Mt Everest or Machu Picchu and peaks beyond—it’s just bloody amazing up here! I never knew I wasn’t here until I finally got here, like people tell you you’ll just know when you go into labor and you can’t know what they mean until you actually do know, an infinite regress of knowing only when knowing, being only when being, recognizing the peak only when peaking.

I’ve never thought so clearly—the air is so clean and true and easy to move through, like the weightlessness of the Moon, Neil Armstrong and me just prancing along, bouncing on the surface, hardly weighted down, knocking back some Tang. What’s more, my arias sound amazing up here, like I’ve found my one true voice, ringing out over the tree line. Wow. If I close my eyes and sing, I sound like Denyce Graves or Barbra Streisand on a good day when you can see forever—strong and sure and clear. It’s exhilarating and liberating and redeeming, this stronghold I have at the top of the world. And yet, hello, hello, hello, here I am, near the bottom, too, my voice echoing in the depths, like a spelunker in a dark, wet cave. Let me go on record as saying that I don’t do bats, not since one stalked me in my apartment in Charlottesville for three nights, me fending it off from underneath an ironing board.

Starting a fantastic new business venture, writing in my real voice for once, hoping to find a way to hold open the space to do the best work of my life—which I know it is—and keep afloat while doing it, until people find it and want it. Work that isn’t for everyone, but for some it will make the difference, both personally and organizationally. Work that I’ll no longer apologize for. Work that feels so good, and with such very good hiking buddies to make my way up the pyramid face.

I’m not at the very bottom, not compared to many in this world, no. But the view from where I am down here is a different one from the middle or the top, a place for questioning whether it’s true – like they say – that if you do what you love, the money will follow.

(Look, I don’t mean to be picky or move too quickly through the doing and loving to the money, but I do have a few questions about that Happy Hypothesis: About how soon does that money follow? And is it following in a straight line? Should I do a Mapquest to help it find its way? Is it stuck at the border somewhere, a victim of the Homeland Security Act? Has it been held up for questioning?)

Perhaps the gap wouldn’t seem so big if the work weren’t so right, so worth the stretch across that abyss, the mile high bridge. I just know that I can’t go back down; rappelling is out of the question. And maybe most entrepreneurs feel this awkward juxtaposition of top and bottom simultaneously when they are following their dream.

I know from Maslow that when needs are unmet, our physiological needs take the highest priority. So my fear is that my needs at the bottom will keep me from staying and playing at the top, that I will deflect that work and go for safety, that I will not be able to hold open that space to be creative, that I will fall prey to the American adoration of the short-term, that I will dive from this peak.

Maslow’s pyramid has five steps, starting at the bottom (click on pyramid to enlarge): 

1. Physiological – I’m comfortable.

2. Safety – I’m safe.

3. Love – I belong.

4. Esteem – I’m respected.

5. Self Actualization – I’m me.

Those are his steps—and yours and mine. But it’s far too easy to stay on Step Four, isn’t it? To stay there and think we’ve reached “I’m me” when we’ve only reached “I’m respected,” achieving the respect of others, not our own. And Step Four—esteem—comes in two versions: the need for the respect of and recognition by others and the need for self-respect. Note to Mr. Maslow: Not to be a bother, and I’m sure you’re a smart man and all, but I’m thinking you needed to divide those two—they aren’t nearly the same and isn’t it the confusion of the two that leads us to have those out-of-body experiences in the first place, always aiming to please others, not ourselves?

There, at the apex of his pyramid in that misty clouded peak, is self-actualization, the instinctual need of a human to make the most of their unique abilities. As Maslow described it, “A musician must make music, the artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualisation.” (Motivation and Personality, 1954)

What must I be? What must you? And if we aren’t those things, how do we feel?  How do we even know it, just as knowing about labor pains really requires being in the throes of them?

Evidently, Maslow tells us, these needs make themselves felt in signs of restlessness. We feel on edge, tense, lacking something, in short, restless. “If a person is hungry, unsafe, not loved or accepted, or lacking self-esteem, it’s easy to know what the person is restless about. It’s not always clear what a person wants when there’s a need for self-actualization.”

Ain’t that the truth. For years my mother has had trouble sleeping because of her “restless” legs. Now I think I might know why.

~*~ 37 Days: Do it Now Challenge ~*~

Pay attention to your twitchy legs.  They’re telling you something important.

Climbing will help.

Leave your base camp.