How to Walk Through Walls

A short story about bravery

[This article has a 5/10 Woo Rating]

The House in the Field

In the book The Untethered Soul, there’s an allegory about a man who finds himself in a gorgeous location in a sunny field. He decides to build his dream home there. Over time he makes the house increasingly sturdy. The walls get thicker and the windows get smaller. The man becomes ever more wary of the unpredictability of the outside world. He ventures out less and less. Eventually the house is fully climate-controlled and lit only by artificial lights. When those lights burn out too, he’s left alone in dim candlelight.

One day he forgets that the sunny field outside even existed.

For the last few years I’ve been lucky to become friends with a man we will call “Andrew.” Up until very recently, Andrew used to work in investment management. Coming later in life than for many others, this kind of career opportunity was a big deal. But he soon found his house in the sun getting ever darker. Andrew is also a superb writer, so he will tell his story in his own words.

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The Wink by “Andrew”

“I landed a gig on the graduate program of A Major Investment Manager in my mid-40s, and I thought that was it. Jackpot, baby. After a lifetime of low-wage jobs, financial security for me and my family was finally to be ours.

Fast-forward four years, and I was spending significant parts of my day hiding in toilet cubicles. My working hours were stagnant, dead time. I felt no real relation to the humans around me.

I’m the sort of person who can’t even stand to be a lackadaisical waiter – I like to do even seemingly mundane things well. But now I had A Real Job, and I was utterly indifferent to any of it.

I was also exhausted and depressed. Not because of hours worked, but from the burden of having to pretend I cared. Not because of pressure, but from constantly editing my natural self. Not because of fear of failure, but from having to think about money all the time.

It was a strange limbo. The voice in my head – or more accurately, heart – became more insistent: I shouldn’t be here. Everything feels wrong.

So quit. Easy, right? Wrong.

Let’s not kid ourselves here: a career in finance is the equivalent of a giant sack of cash. Pretty much everyone in investment is egregiously overpaid, obscenely so, in fact. Never have you seen so many people with no truly discernible talents be so ludicrously overrewarded (myself included). Was I really going to walk away from that, voluntarily? How irresponsible could I be? How could I justify that to my loved ones?

Thankfully, my wife was clearer on the real priority here: she would – and I quote – rather have me back than the money. And I was, slowly but surely, losing me.

And so, by July this year, I’d been actively looking for a number of months. I’d narrowed it down to a simple premise: I get joy from the word, not the number. So, I sent up a few flares, and even had a couple of near misses with some copywriting outfits. I was weighing up whether going back to restaurants part-time and freelancing was viable.

Then I got put in touch with a guy whom someone thought I’d like. When I walked into his company’s small office, I just knew. He didn’t have anything for me, but offered me a couple of freelance jobs. And I literally felt my body telling me that this is more like somewhere you should be.

Cut to my wife and I on our way back from our holiday. I’d still been equivocating right up to the airport bus; but by the time I was on the way into town, I knew that I wasn’t going back to that Major Investment Manager. To do so would mean an acceptance of something I couldn’t accept.

This is where it gets a little woo-woo, but it’s no less true: it feels like I had to quit first to make something happen. Or as Tom put it to me, to get a wink from the universe.

I walked into the office the next morning feeling utterly serene. I walked out about an hour later, unemployed, but feeling something rush back into me like a dam had broken. Life force? Soul? Call it what you will.

What’s also true is that inside 48hrs, I had a job offer from that place I needed to be. I took a 33% pay cut, and I couldn’t have been happier about it. And I didn’t even feel surprised.

There’s a heartbreaking aside to all this. Before I handed in my laptop, phone and pass, I sent an email to the maybe 30 or so people I considered more than a passing acquaintance. In it, I said cheerio, but also the following: “I promised myself on day one I wouldn’t get trapped by the money, and the time has come to honour that promise.”

The number of responses I got that were almost confessional in tone was not insignificant, and that line in particular is what apparently landed with the greatest impact. And what’s most saddening is that they weren’t all middle-aged people encumbered with terrifying mortgages and punishing school fees. In fact, many were quite young, much more so than me.

I’m not judging, I get it – after all, it really did take a huge and conscious effort for me to finally press the button. But what I know now, in my bones, is that I’ve had countless “crap” jobs, but I’ve never been as withered and diminished as I was by The Real Job.

In any case, here I am now. We put our own coffee on in the morning. I have to close up if I’m the last to leave. We debate the best cover versions of all time. No, I’m not writing for The New York Review of Books, but I feel useful. I feel needed by a close-knit team who want each other to do well. I feel mastery over my work. I feel borne by the current of my life.

These are both small things and big things, and they’re all vital – in both senses of the word.

I am singing in the key of me again.”

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Walking Through Walls

“It’s not really difficult to get past the walls. Time and again, every day, the natural flow of life collides with our walls and tries to tear them down. But time and again, we defend them. You must realize that when you defend yourself, you are really defending your walls. There is nothing else to defend in there. There is just your awareness of being and the limited house you built to live in. What you are defending is the house you built to protect yourself. You are hiding inside.”

-Michael Singer, The Untethered Soul

As Andrew found, the walls of your dark house seem solid right up until the moment you’re standing on the other side of them. This dynamic doesn’t just apply to our finances and careers, it’s just that happens to be where we spend most of our lives and focus. If we work at our jobs from a position of scarcity, it can be impossible to see that there’s an abundant alternative. That there’s “the current of a life” out there waiting to be lived by you, as it was for him. We cannot see a world where synchronistic “winks” like the one Andrew received are even possible. At my lowest point in two years of paralysing depression my sister asked me if I could envision any kind of positive future. I tried, and all I could see was darkness. I now realise it was a classic symptom of disconnected consciousness rather than reality. You can't read the label on the jar you're inside.¹

In The Untethered Soul, Singer describes the feeling of walking towards your walls as like going into an abyss. As coach Brian Whetten described to me: your fears are often a great indicator of which direction to walk to return to the field of light waiting for all of us.

The surest way to make a great decision is to look for the choice that evokes these three internal responses: the voice of intuition lights up, the voice of reason checks it out and approves it, and the voice of fear says, “Hell No! Run away!”

In order to transcend your invisible walls, Brian recommends making friends with your fears, a process he calls revolutionary.² My own recent exploration with psychologist Nadja Taranczewski emphasized how money concerns frequently reveal the biggest walls and cause the most darkness. Walking towards your money issues is a profitable pursuit.³

Brian also emphasizes that your intuition is key to a successful leap of faith.⁴ Both your reason and your fears are rooted in the past and present, indeed they can often combine to trap you in that dark house. It’s intuition that pulls you into the future, back into the light. “Andrew’s” description of the draw towards writing and his body’s energetic reaction to the new office is a perfect example.

Our community’s focus at The Leading Edge can be roughly divided into two broad buckets: backward-looking healing work and forward-looking experiments. One integrates fears and blockages, the other encourages and enhances intuition. Eleven different tools and practices emerged from this year’s Accelerating Wisdom Series, most of them in some way forward-looking.

Intuition coach and Leading Edge member Isik Tlabar has recorded a short 25 minute writing meditation. This will help you cultivate your future-focused intuition going into 2025 (listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts).

Grab a pen and paper and get ready:

1. I believe understanding this concept is critical to navigating the current transition society is experiencing. My article on this topic, Thinking the Unthinkable, is the most popular piece I’ve ever written.

2. From our tremendous conversation. Once you’ve identified the voice of fear, Brian argues that you can’t just ignore or repress it. Instead you need to make friends with it. There are four steps.

1. Connect. Think about the decision you want to make, locate the sense of fear in your body. Then ask it “what are you feeling or what do you want to share with me?” And practice listening for an answer. Perhaps use a coach or therapist if the answers don’t arise easily.

2. Understand. Ask your fear what it’s trying to warn you about or protect you from. Frame a worst-case scenario.

3. Accept. Ask it “how are you serving me the best way you know how” or “what is your positive purpose.” Ask those questions with curiosity, love and acceptance.

4. Offer friendship. This means finding a point of agreement between you and your fears. Ask your fear, genuinely, if it agrees to cooperate.

Brian suggests ending the process with the following 3 questions:

1. “I appreciate how you’ve been working so hard to create these goals, in the best way you know how. Would you be willing to work together with me, as friends, to move forward with our goals in ways that might be scary at times yet are also safe?”

2. “What would you need from me in order to better do so?”

3. “Is there anything else you want to share with me?”

3. Read more and listen to my conversation with Nadja here.

4. “The voice of intuition responds to action. It shows up primarily as sensations in the body rather than as thoughts in the mind. It lights up around choices that are on purpose, and if taken, would have the potential to move us up the ladder of consciousness.”- Yes, Yes, Hell No! By Brian Whetten