The Tragic Potential of Just Bumbling Along
For something like 8 years now, I’ve been running an exercises with clients that brings them in touch with their mortality.
It started as something that I borrowed from David Treleaven, and has gradually become mine.
We start with the question, What would make you sad at the end of your life?
And then we keep answering that question, until the client I’m working with has fully explored it.
Then we take those answers and turn them into commitments that that person can live into: the opposites of what would make them sad.
I had a thought recently: I’ve now done this with tens of people. Indeed, in one of my ways of working, it’s required that we do it in order to sign up for the engagement of coaching.
So after all this time, I have a reasonable amount of data: what is it that would make people sad at the end of their lives? What are the patterns and what could that teach even the people who have never done that exercise.
Each list is different, but there are some patterns. And I spotted one this week.
It came partly because I was listening to an interview with Martha Beck who is apparently, among other things, Oprah’s coach. Beck used a phrase over and over again: people ‘jumping the tracks’.
The analogy here might be: your life is rattling along on railway tracks.
We might not even notice - life goes so fast, and before we know it we’ve been through three more stations. We might be afraid to come off - after all, if a train jumps its tracks (i.e. comes off them) it’s disaster. For humans on the tracks of our lives, though, it’s different. Maybe it’s everything you need.
After I listened to Beck, I listened to the investor Cyan Bannister being interviewed. And she spoke about the same thing, in her own way, often using the metaphor of The Matrix. What if there is a mechanised life that we are living in, but it’s possible to step outside it?
And I realised that Beck and Bannister were talking about their versions of one of the patterns I have seen from 8 years of asking people what would make them sad at the end of their lives. Here are the kinds of things I hear:
I’d be said if I had just kept bumbling along.
I’d be sad if I always did what people expected.
I’d be sad if I had never done anything truly adventurous.
Honestly, it feels too personal to share the ones people have actually written. But they’re sometimes even more poetic and beautiful than what I have written here.
But the pattern is clear to me.
For a whole group of the population, the idea of everything going as it’s always been, as it is expected to go, is a potential source of life’s tragedy.
Instead, having been awakened to this risk, these people can lean into the inverse:
I am a commitment to not just bumbling along.
I am a commitment to sometimes doing what no one expects.
I am a commitment to doing truly adventurous things.
I am a commitment to jumping the tracks.
I am a commitment to being a creative human, not a mechanical robot.
Living commitments like these are not easy.
The world and our systems and our expectations and society’s expectations often seem to drag us with a gravitational pull to ‘how things are always going to be’.
Sometimes we need that: we need to be able to keep going, to stick with things.
But not always.
And not forever.
The key changes in our lives or our work may be only just off the tracks. But we have to go there to find out.
And that’s scary.
Bumbling along, doing what everyone expects… those things feel safer.
But remember: the secure way is really the insecure way.
It’s time to step out of what has always been.
To reject the default future that is coming to you on these tracks and let something else guide your life.
It’s time to go on an adventure.
Or at least, it is if you don’t want to be sad at the end of your life.
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PS I had a great reflection recently, to help me articulate the place coaching can have in our lives. I’ve always struggled with the knowledge that coaching isn’t necessary for anyone - anyone can obviously get along without it. And, simultaneously, the seemingly paradoxical knowledge that it is incredibly powerful. Here’s what I think: we can all bumble along with our lives and no on needs a coach. But for the right person at the right time, coaching can help us jump the tracks. If you’d like to do that with me, get in touch.
PPS If you want 2025 to connect you more deeply to your inner sense of integrity and honour, then you might be interested in my latest long-read article. It’s about Mohamed Al-Fayed, Enron and Omar Little from The Wire. It’s called A Man Got to Have a Code: https://www.robbieswale.com/writing/2024/10/11/a-man-got-to-have-a-code-leading-with-honour-iii It also includes an expanded explanation of the Commitments exercise.
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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.