Chasing Air is the Impediment to Living Your Purpose and Cultivating Resilience
From an outsider’s perspective, I was raised as child in the perfect environment to be postured for future success. My father a physician, my mother a schoolteacher, my sister and I were provided sustenance and all the material things to live luxuriously. But I was left for wanting. I loathed my father because I saw him as an outlier. Most weeks he worked seven days, was gone before I woke up and gone when I went to bed. When he was home, he worked on medical charts or studied trends in the medical industry to best serve his patients and practice. Other fathers took their sons to football and baseball games, or to hunt or fish. Instead of a baseball bat, my father gifted me with the Book of Virtues by William J Bennett. My dad was an outlier…and I loathed him for it. I yearned for the experiences of my friends. So, I began chasing air.
Chasing air is the term I’ve coined when you desire or envy the popular and material things in this world. You change yourself to fit in, to connect to the mainstream. After a while, you are left empty, hopeless and with no sense of placement in the world around you because it’s all a façade.
I didn’t have access to a gun to go hunting, or a boat to go fishing, and I didn’t have the resources to go to a sporting event or collegiate tailgate. But what I could do was drink, fight, and party. So that’s what I did, and that’s what I was known for…and that’s the air I chased to put myself on the imaginary pedestal to be popular. That was what I considered the quick win…not working hard at the things I truly loved like science or baseball. I quit those because they got in the way of the air I was chasing.
Somehow, I got the HOPE scholarship and was accepted to North Georgia College. But after earning a 1.7 GPA my first semester, I quit. I never put any thought into how this would affect my future, or to what I would do after this voluntary failure. I had no job prospects and my parents told me not to come home…they didn’t want a drunk teenager in their home. So, I found myself homeless, living in a tent by a river in the North Georgia mountains. I found a job working six days a week, 12 hours a day, at an astounding $22,000 per year. After a month of brushing my teeth and washing my hair in gas station bathrooms, I had had enough. I went to a National Guard recruiter and told him I wanted to go back to college and become an officer. I’d ship out to basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia two months later.
With the utmost chagrin, I called my father, told him the plan, and asked him if I could come home until I went to basic training. He agreed, under conditions…
· Read one book per week and write a 3-page minimum book report.
· Work out and run every day.
· Curfew was 7pm
· No television
· Absolutely no partying, or I was back on the streets.
My father created a form that I had to complete daily on how I spent the day, what workouts and runs were executed and what the plan was for the next day. He initialed next to these and graded my reports. It was difficult at first…my friends would call for me to come party or hang out, and it was a cycle that I was breaking. After three weeks, I became an outlier. I started to become addicted to the rhythm of things. I was reading more than one book a week and I was dominating my workouts. I had a plan, a new future, a new start.
I soon realized that these “conditions” were not solely meant to shackle me to keep away from old habits, but they were created to prepare me, to facilitate growth and find meaning. These conditions taught me purpose, goal setting and the true nature of happiness and connecting to the world. I dominated basic training…and never looked back.
We all chase air to an extent. Corporations know this. That’s why they put “X3” or “LT” on the vehicles they sell. They know many people will say, “Karen has an X5 so I’m getting an X7,” or they know as soon as there’s a new phone upgrade, you’re going to get it and pay more for it for the same reason. These are all distractions, and they tug on us and weigh us down…constantly comparing our lives and material ownership to others.
Sit down and dig deep. Who are you? Who do you want to be? What do you need to do to get there? Get raw with this…clear your head of any externalities that may sway your answers. This is the path to resilience…knowing yourself and staying on track to be your best self. When unforeseen challenges occur, embrace them as growth on your journey. Be an outlier, get uncomfortable, and don’t give two &*@!$ what the mainstream is doing. You cannot achieve this chasing air.
You can only truly be free by finding your purpose, establishing your goals, and working hard to obtain them. One of our mottos in the military was, “Through pain comes discipline.” And as Jocko Willink says, “Discipline Equals Freedom.”
