Let Them Know - It's Okay to Wander
I have more than a few clients like Arin, older teenagers and young adults who carry the beliefs that time and money spent on a particular path or project is wasted when things don’t go according to plan or others don’t approve.
Arin was 19 years old and had just finished her 3rd semester in college. She had chosen to major in accounting because it was practical and made the most sense for the future. Her parents gave their hearty stamp of approval. However, things had not gone according to plan, and as I sat with Arin in a session over the semester break, she was in agony. She had come down with COVID-19 earlier in the year and continued to suffer long COVID symptoms and had to drop some of her classes. She struggled with depression and found no joy in her business classes.
Arin felt caught. She knew she needed a break from school and wanted to change her major. But it wasn’t the plan, she kept insisting. There would be delays. All of her time and effort for the last 18 months would be a waste. She was supposed to know what to do but didn’t. Her parents were not going to be happy. Arin couldn’t bear the thought of returning to school after the break. She could not see her way out of this misery whatever direction she turned.
In addition to processing the myriad dynamics and challenges that come with these issues, I invite my clients to consider letting themselves wander. That it just might be okay to meander rather than make a beeline. I let them know that I am a Shiftless Wanderer and would not be sitting before them if I had not been diverted down many meandering paths, all of them of value in the end.
Being a Shiftless Wanderer
In my 30s and needing direction, I decided I wanted to teach high school English. However, I’m terrible at math, so I failed the math section of the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) needed for the secondary teaching program. I settled for a Kindergarten through 8th-grade education program where I had to learn to teach every subject under the sun, including math.
I taught language arts at several public middle schools for five years. I loved the kids but hated the system. I was miserable. Every fall at the beginning of school my back would go out, and I’d end up in bed for a week, my body telling me to leave teaching. But I hadn’t even finished paying back my school loans! And what was I going to do instead?!
Then, in that 5th year, a boy, I’ll call him Donté, joined my class. The first time I met him, I felt his deep pain and knew that he would break my heart. A few months later, he stopped showing up for class. He had threatened to kill his foster parents, and I never saw him again. Heartbroken, I left teaching and wandered. A chance meeting with a friend at the market the next summer led me to a graduate program in Jungian and archetypal psychologies, a good fit, it seemed. Perhaps I could find answers to the questions that Donté evoked for me.
When I graduated I still was unsure of the path I needed to take. I took a position as a teacher/therapist/education director at a street-involved youth advocacy center. I taught high school courses in this one-room school, because I could teach all subjects, including math. Several years later, I left my job again, my life changed by the students and this work. I continued to search, continued to wander. I went back to school for my PhD and researched trauma, mythopoesis in education, adolescence, and the labyrinth. None of them big money makers!
The Labyrinth
Do you know what a labyrinth is? It’s not a maze. You don’t get lost in a labyrinth. There is only one way in and one way out. But for the full experience, you must meander. The “goal” – if you can call it that – is to get to the center, encounter what mystery you find there, then turn and wander your way back out. If you approach this journey as a wanderer, you are forever changed. My dissertation was a labyrinth
I wandered through that dissertation labyrinth for over 5 years, far longer than intended. I was recovering from a long illness, I lost a grandchild, our family fell apart and fell back together again. I lost friends and almost lost more friends as relationships fractured and life-threatening events occurred. Donté haunted the halls of those pages of my dissertation. As I wrote, I dreamed of my students, and I wandered back in time to my own troubled adolescence. All of it went into the writing.
During my research I came across the words of a psychologist who said, in so many words, that adults need to get those wild teenagers in line otherwise they will do nothing but shiftlessly wander through their lives. I thought of Donté who haunted the halls of my dissertation, of the students I dreamed of, of my own Inner Adolescent, and I rebelled at the idea that we should take the wanderer out of the adolescent. I reclaimed those words, following the thread that led again and again back to adolescence, and called my therapy practice The Shiftless Wanderer. I was beginning to understand that wandering is anything but a shiftless, aimless activity.
What is a Shiftless Wanderer?
Wandering is an attitude toward the twists and turns that life takes us on. We wake in the morning living one life and end the day in a life we couldn’t imagine. Shiftless Wanderers hold certainty and plans very very lightly.
Wanderers do not take tried and true paths. They take the ones that beckon, and only in hindsight do they make sense. Wanderers choose paths or surrender to roads that lead to the unexpected. They trust that wherever they are led there is something necessary to be found there, something of value. Shiftless Wanderers foster, what Gabor Mate describes as “an aligned relationship with the actual present moment.”
To be a wanderer one must be in relationship with what is as well as what could be, what is beyond that horizon and the next. When we wander we encounter constraints, and constraints, if we are wandering, require creative responses—ways of being that would never come about without having to navigate or lean into the boulders in the road.
The Shiftless Wanderer’s mantra are the three wisest words I know: I don’t know. Because one day you may look back upon a moment, an illness, a hindrance, a failure, and recognize it as the moment your life changed. You fail an exam and find yourself years later supporting teachers, therapists, and nonprofits who serve adolescence, writing a blog posting about failing the exam. And you realize that if you had been able to understand math word problems in Mrs. Crumb’s 4th grade class you may never have found your way here.
Be a wanderer
The path is there beneath our feet. Our kids will benefit in the long run if we teach them to take chances, meet the obstacles with creativity and curiosity. Illness, death, broken relationships, traumas, injuries, lost jobs—the list goes on of all the things that come our way as we live this life.
Trust the wandering, I tell Arin. These last few years—and all the years leading up—were not for nought. There is value to be found in all of it, eventually. We’ll work to navigate the conversations with your parents. Keep moving closer to your own Ground of Being. Remind yourself of those wise words, I don’t know. Trust that you’ll arrive exactly where you were aiming for all along, with a wealth of wisdom collected along the way.
Photo by: EVERST