I remember hearing someone once say that all life can be broken into moments of transition that lead to moments of revelation. That someone was a fictional character in the show Babylon 5 which I watched years ago. Yet it’s always been there in the back of my mind like a spectre I’m constantly contending with wanting to know if these transitions I’m go through will ever lead to any kind of a revelation. But its also one of those thing you hear from time to time that makes you sit and say wow thats so true yet it transcends you ability to articulate why , that you’ve come across some great truth but its somehow just outside your grasp or ability to fully internalise.

Something happened to me the other day, one of my colleagues was giving a presentation on why the company was carrying out Emtional Intelligence tests on members of our senior management team. During the course of presentation she asked us to think of two words that summed up what was important to us. My two words were challenge and contentment. She commented on the strange duality in my choice but we didnt go into why I chose those words. Which is a good thing because it was an instinctive choice and I’m not sure I would have been able to articulate why at the time wthout sounding like an idiot.

I guess I wouldnt be saying all this unless something had happened to make me confront that choice … which is exactly what happened last night. I’ve had an obsession with reading philosophical and bigoraphical texts that I suppose most people would class as ancient. I started off years ago with the ancient greeks … Aristotle, Socrates, Plutarch, Xenephon. But just as the wisdom of ancient greece is available to us through the written word, so to is the wisdom of other cultures. My current obsession is with japanese authors. The two authors I’ve been reading most recently are Yamamoto Tsunemoto, and Miyamoto Masashi. I was reading Miyamoto’s The Book of Five Rings and was contrasting it with Yamamoto’s Hagakure. The books, although they focus on the teachings of Samurai contain a wealth of knowledge that, like Sun Tzu’s Art of War, apply to far more than the limited sphere people often think they do.

A number of years ago a Scientologist asked me to fill in a questionnaire and she asked me the same question my colleague did, I vivdly recall giving the same answer. Except this lady really pushed me on why. Challenge is easier to articulate its really about me knowing that I need to be challenged in what im doing, not just at work but in most aspects of my life. If I dont feel that im being challenged the I often become bored and easily distracted and I tend to loose the sense that im either achieving something or that im growing as a person.

Contentment now that’s damn difficult to explain to a scientologist. It boils down to the fact that I just want to be happy about who I am. Of course when I told this lady that she kept pressing me on “dont you want a big house….dont you want a fast sports car, dont you want … blah blah blah”. My answer was no. I recall saying to her “all i want is to wake up each morning, look at myself in the mirror and now that I’m happy to be me, to know that I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve done, and to know that I have no regrets about what I have done or have not done“.

Ironically I couldnt have been more than nineteen years old when I said that, call it the naivety of youth. Somewhere between then and about eighteen months ago I totally lost sight of those ideals. Pain, grief combined with complacency and apathy has a way of doing that to a person. Until one day you dont have any choice but to confront who you are … in my case it happened on the way to work one morning a rather unsavoury gentleman decided he wanted my wallet so he smashed a lead bar on my head. It took me two months to recover, learning to use your eyes again is not fun, and thats a long time to do nothing but lye down and think.

When your laid up in hospital you have a lot of time to think, you become introspective, or well I did. I remember this little ditty playing in my head during that period … like a form of self torture I guess …

Do you wrestle with dreams?
Do you contend with shadows?
Do you move in a kind of sleep?
Time has slipped away.
Your life is stolen.
You tarried with trifles.
Victim of your folly.

You think about all the things that might have happened, all the things you wish you had done. I guess it was then I realised I didnt like the person I’d become, and it was time for change. So I made a number of changes in my life, for one thing I got a new job in an environment that I knew I’d be happy in, and that I could grow in and find some contentment I guess. I promised myself that I’d become the person I once was.

Then yesterday I read this Yamamoto’s text:

If by setting one’s heart right every morning, and every evening, one is able to live as though one’s body is already dead, he gains freedom in the Way. His whole life will be without blame, and he will succeed in his calling.

I dont know what enlightenment feels like, and this could all just be altruistic crap, but this transition that I’ve gone through over the last two years finally led to the simple revelation that I’d come full circle again, im finally content again with who I am.