Integrating Work and Spirit

For many years, I kept my spiritual life (Druidry) separated from my work (computational linguistics). Of course, there are certainly strong overlaps — you only have to look at the 50+ articles under ‘Word and Spirit’ in the sidebar to see that. And every once in awhile I’d cast a spell for prosperity or something similar. And the people at work sometimes good-naturedly joke about how Druids dance naked around Stonehenge. Ha ha! Never heard that one before. But for the most part my professional life has been secular, and my religious life non-professional.

Somewhat reassured, I began making lists — lists of things I really wanted to achieve professionally. And not vague things, specific things. Unfortunately I can’t share that list publicly, or Amazon would have my hide; but when I wrote it out it lit a fire under me.

And this is where the overlap between Druidry and my professional work began to come into clearer focus for me. I have the chance to work on things that strike at the heart of how thought and language are organized; and as any Druid — or mystic of any spiritual stripe — will tell you, language is sacred.

Odin hung from the World Tree, a sacrifice of himself to himself, to discover the runes, the holy alphabet that simultaneously encodes human language and the symbols of spirit. Odin is my mentor in this. I’m not just trying to teach a machine to understand speech; I’m trying to uncover a representation of language and meaning that’s even more basic than letters — a representation which can be translated into the building blocks of machine code.

Meanwhile, on a more mundane level, Amazon had set its own priorities for me. My boss agreed that I needed to do more machine learning, but that I also needed to work harder on improvements to our lexical resources and tokenization. And in general, I should be more proactive and more visible.

Fortunately our goals — mine and Amazon’s — overlapped a lot. And for most of these goals, I knew what I needed to do to get going.

Managing Management

But what about “being more proactive and visible”? For me, this was way too vague. I didn’t even know where to begin.

So, almost on a whim, I stuck that phrase — “being more proactive” — in Google, just to see what came out. And guess what? There are thousands of articles about that. I started reading… Article after article, for the better part of an hour. It gave me lots of things to think about. When I stumbled on something that resonated with me, I wrote it down. After a day or two of thinking and allowing my subconscious to ruminate, parts of these pits and pieces began to congeal into an an action plan — something concrete that I could actually believe in.

First, to be more visible: in email and in meetings, always contribute your point of view. Try to be less afraid of making a fool of yourself. Even if it’s just to explain why you agree with someone else. Occasionally, send out a mass email about your concerns.

Second, focus on learning more. The more you learn, the more you can contribute. And the more you can contribute, the better you’ll be known and liked.

The most interesting exercises for boosting self-confidence were here and here. As for being proactive, I decided to develop a meditative practice to encourage it, based on this article.

While reading and thinking about ‘being proactive’ and ‘taking ownership’, it finally struck me how passive I’d been in my career thus far. For whatever reason — probably just my personality — I’d been largely content to allow other people to set my agenda and judge my progress. After all, I never had a big-picture view of the company, the department, or its goals; how was I to know how to set priorities?

But it’s become clearer to me over time that no one has a true big-picture view. This isn’t a jab at Amazon, or any other company I’ve worked for; it’s just a fact about any large organization (i.e., one with more than, say, a thousand people). Any one person, in management or out of it, only has a small piece of the information they need, and so they rely on others to be experts. And they need their experts to not just answer questions and give advice, but to anticipate problems and fix them ahead of time. Managers, in other words, shouldn’t tell you what to do; they don’t know what you should do. They should provide goals and resources and get out of the way.

I realized I shouldn’t be asking for permission. I should be saying, “Here’s what I’m doing. Here’s how long it will take. And here’s how it’ll help.”

Plan vs. Action

This whole process took a week or two — orienting myself, figuring out a new plan, and getting started. It wasn’t pleasant.

But then I was in motion, and I had some inertia. I felt much more in control of what was going on. I began to see opportunities to step up and get things done, making myself more helpful and more visible. I made a lot of progress very quickly, and started to get excellent feedback.

Oddly enough — and perhaps it’s surprising to read this — ultimately, I didn’t stick to my plan at all. After I read all that advice about productivity and proactivity, and made plans to do exercises and meditations and so on… I honestly never did any of it. A plan, after all, isn’t really about the future; it’s about getting yourself in motion now. A specific, rock-solid plan is only useful when you’re standing still. When you’re actually moving, plans have to become fluid immediately; you must hold them loosely and reexamine them often. As it turned out, for me personally, the exercises and meditations would have been a distraction from actually doing the work.

Integrity and Death

When Odin hung himself from the World Tree, part of him died. If it had not, it wouldn’t have been a sacrifice. But as death is a part of nature, it is also part of the soul; it is how the soul changes. A life cannot be constant growth, with no pruning, no pause. Eternal growth is cancer, not life.

In a very small way, when I was given a poor performance review, I was told that part of me had to die. It was no wonder that I went through stages of denial, panic, bargaining, and so on. It was difficult. Fortunately, I had help — from my wife, my guides, and my gods. And by pulling together parts of myself that I’d been holding separate — by integrating them, and thereby, in a very real sense, increasing my integrity — I rallied myself and created the seeds of a new whole.

Even death is not to be feared by one who has lived wisely. –the Buddha

, which was incredibly helpful. I’ll be writing about that next.

Druid Journal — Spiritual Guidance by Word, Card, and Star
http://druidjournal.net/