Born For This (2021)
“I am the luckiest man in the world. I found what I was born to do.” The words of Dr. Hugh Morgan Hill, or ‘Brother Blue’ as he was better known as. As I read them I smile and realise he has a message for me. At nearly 57 I am finally ready to hear these words and believe that I may soon be able to say them too.
I read the words in a book called Come of Age by Stephen Jenkinson. The subtitle The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble probably tells you all you need to know about the book. It’s not a handbook or a manual, it doesn’t provide answers. But it does offer creative inspiration, food for the imagination. I’ll probably write about it as part of an exploration into the role of mentor that I offer as part of Still Waters.
“I am the luckiest man in the world. I found what I was born to do.” I take on board the underlying assumption that there is something we are all born to do. That’s quite a big leap to start with. It’s a construction in my head. It might also be true. It’s enough for me to know it is a possibility and to realise that I have not much to lose by being open to it.
In my case the answer comes fast and with power. I was born to help ease the suffering of my fellow adoptees. Full stop. The end. Even as I write these words I feel their impact on me. I realise of course they might be my primal wound speaking; a desperate desire to matter, to feel valuable and valued, to belong. But it doesn’t feel like that – I know how that feels and it is not this. I have had this sensation before, five years ago while I was doing the Hoffman process; it’s more like a calling. That sounds terribly grand, I don’t mean it to be, it’s just when I think it there is a rightness to it.
The good news is I am already on that path. I made a commitment to offer something to the adoptee community even though I wasn’t sure what. The birth of Still Waters got me on the pitch. So now these words feel like an affirmation and a reassuring whisper to keep going, to find my way. I realise that the work I have evolved into, my professional practice if you like, has provided me with the tools I might need to do what I was born to do. That the research I’m working on is in service of this. That my own healing serves others.
In my case, perhaps I was literally born to help adoptees. It would have been so easy to have not been born at all – termination was the alternative option for my birth mother. She could have kept me and then I would never know what it is to be adopted. These were alternate paths that I didn’t take; roads untravelled. Lots of people are adopted, I hear you say, and they aren’t all born to ‘help ease the suffering of my fellow adoptees’. It’s true, it’s valid and it doesn’t matter. Brother Blue may well have had the same thoughts; I’ll never know. But he chose to believe he had found what he was born to do, and that made him feel like the luckiest man alive. He chose to believe in a universe that gives purpose to each of our births. That will do for me.
My thoughts turn away from the cosmic implications and toward the more prosaic. How to manifest this vocation – how to make the most of my good fortune? A few pages after the quote, Jenkinson explores the idea the universe is calling us all if we can hear it and in so doing he offers me some of his own words that immediately calm me down.
“We have come to you now, as you are coming to see. So this is what has become of you and your allotment of days. Your worthiness and your abilities on this matter have already been established. It hasn’t required of you that you feel able or ready, only that your proceed dumbfounded and prone to this, and that you are seized by an imperative that you are yet to translate, that must be translated.”
I don’t know what to do or how to do it. But I know why. And I know it must be done. I don’t know how long it will take, whatever it is, but I know I am ready with the energy, the tools and the will.