Peter’s Parable
In the winter of 1983, I fell into a deep career funk.
The previous fall, I had completed the toughest learning assignment of my life, the University of Western Ontario’s Management Training Course, a 5-week business school program during which I and my classmates worked through a mere 96 case studies. I did it because the president of my organization had promised me greater responsibility if I made my way through the program successfully. However, soon after I returned to work, that president left and a new one took over. Despite telling me he would honour his predecessor’s promise, in the end the new one did not. Thus my funk.
To describe my performance over the next 8 months in a nutshell, I was the worst employee, colleague and boss you could imagine: self-absorbed, cynical and angry. You can also guess how much fun I was as a husband and father. I had never before been this bad for and to others … hardly the stuff of a desired legacy!
It was at this time that I decided to participate in a Banff Wilderness Seminar, the mountain-climbing Outward Bound course I described in CTP Blog 3. What I did not disclose in that blog was the fact that the last 24 hours of the program were spent alone in the wilderness of the Canadian Rockies … no real food (only an apple and a handful of nuts), some water, tea bags, a campfire and a personal journal for nourishment, safety and company.
Let me set the stage just a bit more before I tell you the outcome of my story here. One of our guides had walked me to my “site”, which I was told was about a mile from the next fellow’s site. No visitation privileges. We were not allowed to converse on the walk in and I was tasked with being by my lonesome for the next 24 hours, at which point my guide would return and we would walk back out (a couple of miles) silently. The intention was to give each seminar participant undistracted time in which to sort out whatever each individual had “going on”. Given what I told you about my funk, I had things to sort out, in spades.
The next 24 solitary hours were already going to be agony for a gregarious social being like myself. But as he left, the guide pointed to a large pine tree nearby and offered me two parting words: “bear tree”. Meaning I should climb it if a grizzly happened by. No distractions indeed! I immediately gathered more wood for my campfire than I would need for a month alone and spent the deepest and darkest night of my life wide awake, hearing all sort of strange and alarming noises around me.
I did not sleep a wink. Having no one to talk to, I opened my blank personal journal and started writing. Those 96 case studies the year before had drilled a problem-solving process into my thinking and it took most of the night for me to figure out what had happened to me … or rather what I had done to myself AND what I needed to do to fix myself.
Given my university studies in literature, what came out on paper was the basis for Peter’s Parable. By the time I had finished writing it, I knew what I had to do, and it was well within my power to do it. Here’s the parable and my subsequent action plan:
An errant monk stopped on the stony slopes of the main highway he was travelling. He had come upon a sightless man groping to regain the higher ground.
From a distance, the monk called to him gently: “Are you in need?” To which the sightless man replied: “Yes, I have lost my way - will you help me?”
“Of course,” said the monk, “are we not brothers of a larger family, and is it not a brotherly duty to help one another?”
“You will excuse my lack of brotherly love, my friend,” retorted the man harshly, “but it was one your ‘brethren’ who caused my eyesight to be lost … I am no part of his, your or any family for that matter.”
The monk breathed deeply, drinking in the sense of the man; and behind the cynicism, he softly touched despair.
The monk thought for a moment, and then asked: “Are you travelling alone?”
“As you can well see,” replied the man, somewhat irked.
“Perhaps, but I meant not only companions on the road.” said the monk, “whom do you carry within?”
And the sightless man fell silent for a long while.
“No one,” he replied at last. “Shortly after I lost my vision, the muse within departed for more hospitable climes; the mirth no longer surfaces … and the child in me disappeared many years ago. But why do you ask after my inner silences?”
Came the strong and measure reply: “Find these your former friends, and you will know your way again.”
And the blind monk slowly regained his road.