Life Tunnels
The Pros and Cons of “Being on a Mission”
I had a dream a few nights ago, especially vivid, in color and emotionally riveting. I was piloting a B-17 four engine bomber over Nazi Germany in early 1945. In “real” life I have a pilot license but know nothing (I’m not a gamer) about combat bomber runs or a B-17 airplane. It wasn’t the days in 1943 when the American 10 person bomber crews had near zero percent chance of surviving the required 25 missions and numbly made as many missions as possible awaiting near certain death. I had adrenaline but knew that myself and crew might or might not die. Mostly I was concentrating on reading instruments, staying in formation, following procedure, getting my bombs to the right place at right time, doing my job. Focused. In my dream my co-pilot was more experienced and suggested I feather the props as a way to maintain speed and altitude but burn less fuel. I was grateful for the steady guidance. Above all I noticed how monomaniac I was on the task at hand, self-observing that few digressions outside the immediate task were in my thoughts — doing the mission was nearly all absorbing.
After I woke up I wrote this dream down in greater in more laborious detail. I looked up stories and interviews with American B-17 and B-24 bomber crews and listened to their incredible bravery, the skill and bravery of the Luftwaffe fighter pilots who shot them down, the desperate flak gunners who reeked havoc on the planes and crews (have you ever heard the term “flak jacket”?) and the unbelievable hellish tragic death and suffering that occurred at bomb target sites. “Memorial Day” is useful but in Lincoln’s words “far beyond our power to add or detract”.
But this story is about us and living our lives. It occurs to me that at any one moment in the day we regularly find ourselves “on a mission” (recognized or not) — be it a task at work, getting to self or kids to appointment on time, improving toward some goal, checking something off a “to-do” list. Sometimes the mission is honorable like reaching out to a friend or writing a thank you card, sometimes it is just fulfilling a real or perceived requirement. Sometimes the mission can be relatively short, like getting groceries, or sometimes longer such as raising children or pursuing personal or career goals. Sometimes the mission starts out as something needing to be done online and turns into a “rabbit hole” of social media and ever more customized clickable information (sometimes with increasingly near AI precision) to appeal to our own individual attention and tendencies — a mission tunnel with it’s own intriguing and ominous name, “echo chamber”.
In my case just two months ago I finished a tunnel mission of repairing and selling my recently deceased son’s house and using the proceeds to close the estate, provide some money to his daughter and give myself the satisfaction of leaving my son’s one asset in good shape. In the interval since finishing this personally dramatic project I had been at loose ends, continuing to flail about for a replacement for what had been a self-assigned forced march. That, I believe, was what my dream was about — my ego as the pilot and my psyche as the co-pilot (hey, if we’re going to be on a mission our intuition will often join in and be helpful). I am a probably an obsessive compulsive addictive “mission” type person.
This starts to get towards the moral of the dream story, at least for me. Consider the possibility that “being on a mission” and “focused” can perhaps be very paradoxical with a virtually limitless list of significant pros and cons. My perception is we hear maybe more frequently the virtues (pros) of focus being extolled. Grit, persistence, laser focus burning brilliant vs. generalized warm sunshine, goals, consistency, results and “denting the universe” — the achievement stuff.
Let’s consider the other side. What if our mission isn’t tuned to our own authentic life but rather is living out of energy imparted by important well meaning others (such as parents, our culture, our allegiance to ideals or religion) or by our own former self at a time of different circumstances? By its nature mission focus tends to short-circuit broader vision and stepping back to a place of honest and humble reflection or contemplation. What if our mission and focus is creating conflict, fear, blindness and judgement with (or against) people in our life who for whatever reason are in a different mission tunnel? Our missions, after all, can often be at odds with other people’s missions or even be at conflict within ourselves. At its extreme isn’t intensity focused mission a large part of the circumstance that creates an extremist jihad? If “sin” is etymologically “missing the target” doesn’t an intense (admirable) focused goal oriented mission turn everything tangent into a “sin” (so to speak)?
So, what’s the point, what’s the problem? Contrary to the photo I put at the top of this essay it’s not “balance”. Let’s get to the moral of the story already: All great truths are paradoxical, being on a mission can be both great and/or dangerously harmful.
If you have read this far and feel threatened, confused or annoyed or are feeling defensive about being absorbed with the importance of “mission” — chances are it’s time to step back and quietly contemplate and examine alternatives and get feedback from others about one or several central missions going on in your life. My current mantra is “I am not on a bomber run, breathe, be in the moment, hear the birds, feel the air, notice the smells, feel the bottom of my feet. I have no where to go and nothing to become.”
On the other hand, if by chance you have had no identification with the idea of being focused, tunnel visioned, being on a mission or being about some absorbing goal and think the point of life is just to be “happy” — maybe it could be challenging to set aside ego gratification and do some uncomfortable soul searching about meaning, a fearless search for the purpose of your life. Asking ourselves what thing(s) are paramount, that we would give our life for — and checking with a significant other if they can name those thing(s) without any “hints”. Maybe it would be good to bravely and humbly search for any repressed calling that feels too risky or vulnerable to bring to serious conscious consideration and ask ourselves what would be the next right step toward that calling.
The moral is this: Mission, focus, priority goals, aspiration whatever word we want to use is a unbelievable paradoxical energy that can be one of our greatest powers and one of our most destructive and limiting paradigms. Knowing the difference, making recurring evaluation, re-examining and questioning everything is a conundrum that however daunting might just be the difference between a life well lived or a life stunted and wasted. It is almost certain that one who thinks themselves good at it is not.
