What is the Life Task here?

 Suggested by EWR: Emphasis by JW:​

​

Find the life task There's a story in Carl Jung's autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, in which the future psychotherapy pioneer is hiding in the shrubbery of his family home, eavesdropping on his father's conversation with a friend. By this point, the adolescent Jung had been off school for six months, owing to mysterious fainting spells somehow connected to his fear of mathematics classes (and misdiagnosed by one doctor as epileptic seizures). Mainly, he'd revelled in the time off. But just recently, he'd had the creeping sense that staying home was turning into an unseemly way of avoiding life. Then he heard the friend ask his father: "And how is your son?" "Ah, that's a sad business," my father said. "The doctors no longer know what is wrong with him. They think it may be epilepsy. It would be dreadful if he were incurable. I have lost what little I had, and what will become of the boy if he cannot earn his own living?" Jung describes being "thunderstruck" on hearing this – and knowing immediately what he had to do. "This was the collision with reality," he writes. "'Why, then, I must get to work!' I thought suddenly. From that moment on, I became a serious child. I crept away, went to my father's study, took out my Latin grammar, and began to cram with intense concentration." He worked on, and eventually the fainting symptoms vanished. As the therapist Deborah Stewart put it in a recent edition of the (excellent) podcast This Jungian Life, Jung recognised in that moment that buckling down and studying was the "essential life task" that faced him. His character was being tested – and to move forward into life, rather than avoiding it, he needed to get to work. This reminded me that I've long loved Jung's idea of the "life task", and of asking "what's the life task here?" as a way of clarifying the road ahead when you're indecisive or unmotivated, or something just doesn't feel right. (Jung usually writes as if we each have one single "life task", so I'm adapting the phrasing a bit – but not, I think, the spirit of the idea.) You could misinterpret the shrubbery anecdote as showing Jung finally succumbing to parental pressure, or acquiring the belief that hard work is always a virtue, or something else. But the point about a life task is that it's something life is demanding, so it might or might not overlap with all those external and internal pressures and ideals. In this case, as it so happened, what life demanded of the young Carl was what his father (and the Swiss education system) also wanted of him. But it might easily have been otherwise. Sometimes – and I speak as a PhD dropout here – your life task might precisely be to get off the hamster wheel of academic achievement, or to take a path of which society or your friends or family might disapprove. So how will you know you're on the right track? For a start, a life task will be something you can accomplish "only by effort and with difficulty,"  JW: "life task" lies outside my comfort zone. ... outside my comfy chair. as Jung puts it – and specifically, I'd say, with that feeling of "good difficulty" that comes from pushing back against your conditioned preferences for comfort and security. In other words, it will feel counterinstinctual. What that requires of you, in concrete terms, could be the polar opposite of what's required of someone else. It could mean leaving a relationship or job – but it could mean recommitting far more vigorously to one. It could mean getting down to work, as in Jung's case; but it could just as easily entail finally letting yourself rest. A minor personal example: I've been deep in preparation for Designing Your System for Creativity, this coming weekend (tickets available here, until Thursday night!). I want it to be as useful as possible for those participating, and my instinctive tendency is to try to achieve that result by working flat out, round the clock, putting the rest of life – and certainly any thought of relaxing – on hold until it's over. But I'm learning that at this point in my Life Journey™, my real challenge involves not behaving like that. My "life task", narrowed down to the context of this specific project, involves bringing relaxed focus to the work for a few hours a day; cultivating the trust that I already know my material and have something valuable to share; and maintaining and enjoying the ordinary rhythms of family life in the meantime. And for me, this is hard! The sad truth is that I'd find it easier to take the more stressful, joy-postponing route. (JW: I recognize this.) I don't mean I'd find it pleasant, but certainly more psychologically comfortable. On the other hand, you can be certain that a life task is always something that is possible. It will be something you can do. If you only have £100 in the bank, your life task won't require that you have immediate access to a £1,000 computer monitor (though it might involve doing something to raise the cash). If you're the single parent of three small kids, it won't require working 18-hour days for a tech startup; and if you're unable to have children, it won't involve becoming a biological parent.   The whole point of a life task is that it is demanded by the reality in which you actually find yourself.  (JW: i.e. it is not a fantasy from someone else's life! or a should from the outside world like I should go to Africa and feed the starving children ... or go nurse ailing wolves in Idaho, or ...  all those other shoulds.) This helps distinguish it from certain high-pressure notions of "destiny" or "calling", which can leave people feeling as if their life situation is thwarting something they were "meant" to do. I imagine sceptical readers raising an objection here: isn't this all a bunch of made-up nonsense? What exactly is this "life" we're speaking of, which can supposedly "make demands" on us? Isn't Jung just conjuring a supernatural notion of inner purpose out of thin air? To which my answer is: sure, maybe, but I'm not sure it matters. Asking yourself "what's the life task here?" is a way to shift your perspective. It's a way to get outside of the assumptions that otherwise too easily govern a life: that you have no option but to continue on your current path, for example; or that you're obliged to do something extraordinary with your career; or that you mustn't make choices on which others might frown. On some level, you know when you're hiding out in some domain of life, flinching from whatever challenge life has placed before you. The purpose of a good question like this is just to haul that knowledge up into consciousness, where you can actually do something about it.