Your inner calling, illustrative case
por Silvia Malamud em STUM WORLDAtualizado em 07/02/2009 19:10:50
Translated by Cristina Paixão Lopes - [email protected]
Claudio (fictitious name) is a powerful executive in a multinational company and has an absolutely perfect family – according to his society’s parameters. He has children that are in full growth age and is aware of the world’s sores and the social reality around them. He is married to a beautiful intelligent woman who always follows him in all the necessary activities.
Like many executives of this stature, Claudio constantly travels on business often leaving his wife and children waiting for his return.
All this busy and correct life stimulates him more and more to develop himself within his field of work and he constantly sees himself opening up to new horizons so that bolder enterprises come to his life.
Like so many other executives, Claudio had lived for years in a supposed category of king of a personal universe that is perfectly understandable in the 21st century. Models such as these are presently in full growth. Those who are not on the top of this kind of pyramid seek frantically to be there, no matter how.
Returning to Claudio’s case, everything was correct and impeccable. What he did not expect, though, was to suddenly start to hear a kind of inner calling. Such calling has been observed and investigated by several people who study the human being – from existentialists to philosophers to spiritualists – and it starts with a feeling of discomfort that gradually leads the person to question the sense of his/her previous life.
This is an individuation process, as Jung wisely defined; a process every human being has the opportunity to undergo. That is when we are summoned to give a quantum leap to a much more significant and attractive life. And that happens however good our lives are. It does not depend on any previous situation.
It happens when the self demands to express and acknowledge itself. It happens when we leave aside those personalities inserted into us and considered efficient for us to move around in the context we were born in. It is a transition phase, when we have the chance to separate weed and wheat, that is, what is good for us and what is senseless from now on.
In the case of our executive, as an example of many who live completely automatized lives, the uncomfortable feeling made him feel as if life was not really running through his veins. Because he did not know how to escape such silent anguish, he started to feel that everything surrounding him was boring, monotonous. His wife did not charm him that much anymore, his friends talked too much…
He began to look at other women, seek new friends, but the void and the lack of sense in life still devastated him. Claudio was not the kind of person who easily falls into depression. He was reactive and not used to thinking very deeply about himself. For that same reason, all these questions – besides the lack of solution – left him more and more confused and irritated, sometimes indifferent. His inner world was in revolution, in a chaos he did not understand.
In a moment when he could no longer bear his insatisfactions, he sought the help of a friend; not satisfied, he sought his religious belief, but absolutely nothing removed his feelings of existential void and lack of meaning.
On the outside he tried to live life as before, but on the inside a revolution was going on!
Seeing his inconstancies, a more sensitive friend suggested that he sought therapeutic help or slowed down and had the courage to commit himself to what made sense to him.
In the beginning, Claudio hesitated and denied his friend’s crazy advice. During their talk, though, for some endless instants, his life seemed to be only and just a movie without the slightest sense… At the end of their conversation, he felt a kind of panic for the first time in his life. He was afraid of dying without having been born.
From that marking encounter with his friend, he started to little by little redefine his existence. With time his life was gradually transformed. He became lighter, younger, but more mature.
In a moment of anguish and maximum increase of that feeling of void during that period of transformation, which he now welcomed, he started a therapeutic process. At the end of this memorable cycle of great changes, he was perfectly well.
Claudio did not have to change his profession, leave his wife, etc. He only gained a new look and sensitivity towards everything. Many things were transformed inside and outside him, but others remained the same, but infinitely more vivid.
