This week’s episode of the podcast This Human Business deals with the cultural practice of pilgrimage in commercial culture. So, for the rest of this week, I will be surveying the emotions that are triggered through the course of a pilgrimage.
The natural beginning is trepidation, the unsettled feeling we get when we are about to begin something of importance. The word “trepidation” comes from the same source as the word “tremble”, because when one feels the emotion of trepidation, it might cause one’s body to shake with nervous energy.
Near the beginning of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Frodo reflects on the warnings of the great traveler Bilbo, in whose steps he is about to follow.
He used to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river; its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door,” he used to say. “You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to. Do you realize that this is the very path that goes through Mirkwood, and that if you let it, it might take you to the Lonely Mountain or even further and to worse places?”
What kind of fool would not feel trepidation at the beginning of a great pilgrimage? To be on pilgrimage is to invite uncertainty. Yet, our culture values bravery, the willingness to begin on an unknown path. We celebrate the intrepid, those who do not feel trepidation at the beginning of an perilous quest, but what kind of fool’s hand would not tremor upon full realization of what might lay ahead?
In the podcast on pilgrimage, Matthew Burgess, who specializes in creating professional environments that stimulate creativity, speaks of an acceptance of the emotion of trepidation, acknowledging the power of the unknown, but choosing to step forward on the path anyway.
“There’s an unknown in all these things, and I think this unknown thing is part of how creativity works, but you have to go into the unknown to find the new, and I think that you can’t find an efficient, well I won’t say that you can’t, but to efficiently go into the unknown feels like something which I don’t think I’d trust someone to say that, I will efficiently go and explore the unknown.
If you’re trying to find something new, then that process involves surrendering yourself to a bit of inefficiency.
If you use another English mythology of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe stories, where there’s another world that you go into, and that this world is separate from your existing world, and you go into it in a particular way, like you’re going through a wardrobe, I like the wardrobe thing because it felt ordinary and yet inside was something extraordinary.
If you’re going to have this unknown that you are exploring within the work world, that there is a place to go to it and then a place to come back from it, and that the things that you bring back are there to kind of balance the efficiency beast.
You’ve got to find your way into and out of these places without a map. You know that you there might be some familiar bits and pieces that there might be some ways in and out, but your compasses don’t work in there.”
Go forth, into the pilgrimage of the week, with no compass.
