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I’ve always thought that one of the best kept secrets of management theory is that middle management sucks.  Have you every noticed that there are very few movies about middle management and whenever there is a story about middle management it is about a submarine or boat where the “business unit manager” is far enough away from the “strategic leaders” to do some leadership, or we see the middle manager bailing out and rediscovering life as in Jerry Maguire.

Middle management sucks because it is all management.  It is all about “to do” lists.  Being a housewife is similar.  “To do lists” take up too much of our attention.  It is a percentage thing.  While everything on the the list is important, we should never allow our lives to be overtaken by what is urgent and important.  Urgent and important should be allowed, how much do you think?  1%?  And if you have so many urgent and important tasks, then the other 99% will just have to be many too.

But will we allow ourselves the freedom of work that is not urgent and important?  As David Whyte says, we make another “to do list” because we are scared that we are nothing and nobody without one.  Yes, it quite interesting when our “to do” lists vanish.  If we are suddenly ill.  Or when we change jobs and nobody knows who we are.  When we don’t get email and our phone doesn’t ring.  It is quite disconcerting.  We hang on to domination by urgent and important, though thoroughly dreary tasks that are large, because they are, but larger than ourselves and our dreams?

For the last 10 years, as a displaced person/migrant, I’ve oscillated between frenetic completion of to do lists of commercial tasks like residence permits, bank accounts, etc. etc. - things I hate to do at the best of times - and silence.  I think this is why migration is so miserable.  Not dealing with bankers and government officials - they are people too.  Not taking boring jobs.  The jobs are important in their own right.  Migration is miserable because we make the mistake of allowing the “to do list” and the silences that surround them be all that it is.

We have to resolve to reengineer our lives around a dream, around what we love to do and what others love us to do because we do it so well.  We have to allow the “to do” work and silences fit in to that space, not be our only space. We are letting priorities become goals and to constrict our spaces until we cannot breathe anymore - rather literally for some.

We need to sit down with a piece of paper and draw a little circle for our little life as a migrant, or as a housewife, or as a middle manager (those scare me more than being a migrant).  Around that little circle we should draw a giant circle representing our horizons and dreams.  And stare at the empty space between the two.  Pretty scary.  I feel my chest constrict.  I want to walk away.

I mustn’t.   I must start defining the points on the horizon.  The points I love and I am drawn to.  And then start filling in any points between me and there, any point at all, useful or not.   I need to take the first step and to put down the first point.

It is hard when immediate pressures are all around us.  And it doesn’t happen instantly.  We keep looking nervously at that tight centre of tedium.

So crisscross over.  Promise yourself you will be back to watch it like a pot on the stove or a sick child.  But branch out in each direction to see how far you can see.  It is only a piece of paper after all. Just add a point.  See if you can.

See if you dare lie a life when priorities take up 1% of your existence and are priorities, not limits and constraints.

David Whyte takes about finding the frontiers of your life: the place where you face the unknown in an expansive way. I like the correspondence with Paulo Coehlo’s horizon.