The Mountain in Act II
What the audience sees before the hero does
On June 12th, I parted ways with my employer. It ended months of uncertainty at work. Snap ... cut ... and I got out with no drama. For a few days, it felt liberating and exhilarating at times, and scary and uncertain at others. That change opened up many tied-up options — I have infinity-minus-one choices to explore, and many things I postponed in my career and life to pick up. Now is the time to act and get going. But there was fog, too.
Beneath that fog, the mountain was uneasy and restless. Its identity was shaken up. The public facade of the title, influence, and accomplishments needed a real-quick makeover for the mountain to appear strong and tall. The story was that I would eventually morph my identity mountain into something else — for months, I had a list of things to work on and the principles I would follow to guide that future. But that got the story upset when the moment arrived. The mountain was worried because its identity was tied to that facade, and something needed to be done about it. Positive and negative thoughts started swirling in the head. I began ruminating. Here is a list I made that afternoon.
Great, I am free, and I can pursue all those things now. (++mountain)
I did an amazing job, and I have fantastic stories to tell about my career. (++mountain)
I wonder if some people did not like me, and that created adverse conditions. (—mountain)
But I got company. I was not alone. There were others. Good, there is good company. (++mountain)
Some people might interpret that I performed poorly. Did I? (—mountain)
But that is not true. I delivered amazing results. People reached out to tell me that. (++mountain)
The future is uncertain. My identity is shaken. I have things to do. I don’t know where to begin. (—mountain)
I have so many opportunities ahead. I’m just starting soon. That is all. (++mountain)
Others are still stuck. They don’t have the same luxury of an exit. (++mountain)
That list looked impressive — six up and three down, net positive. Awesome. I could dwell and bask in its glory. Yet, it did not seem right. Shouldn’t such a list reframe the situation and drive me to do what needs to be done? Not so fast. It felt like this was a way the mountain feeds itself — constantly grazing the landscape, scanning for threats, finding ways to pat itself, while still asserting its certainty. Is this yet another way the mountain is tightening its hold? Time to dig deep.
The First Error: Attributing Essence
Look at that list again. The idea that I can pursue all those things makes the future exciting. Look, I am free to do all these amazing things. The mountain would then wait for others to congratulate. The doubt about whether some people liked me made the past seem less glorious. Yet, the mountain would spin it in its favor: That place was a mess. Then wait for others to tell me how glad they are about it. Or take the last item on the list. How would the mountain spin that? Look how great it worked for me.
Earlier in this essay series, I wrote that rumination is a search for vindication. That’s the same mechanism playing out again. Each positive validates the mountain. For most negatives, the mountain finds a way to spin it around in its favor. For the remaining, it worries. That’s the nature of the mountain. It needs to be fed.
The error here is not making such lists. Such lists certainly help reflect on the past and decide what the moment calls for. But each item in the list is the mind’s fabrication in its search for vindication. Not recognizing that it is a fabrication is also not the error, as I wrote in Sandcastles and the Mountain.
The error is attributing essence or meaning to those items. The error is believing in each of them and then letting those beliefs guide our emotional states. For instance, linger on any positive for more than a passing minute, and you begin to feel great. Linger on any negative item for more than a passing minute, and you begin to worry. The belief in their truthfulness is the error. The mistake is letting such imagination create pleasure or grief, anger or attachment, guilt or righteousness. The entry into an emotional roller coaster begins with a harmless ticket — start with simple fabrications, then begin to believe them, and then come the emotional twists and turns.
What is wrong with listing the positives and negatives to carve out next steps? Didn’t we just agree that they provide a step to move on? Yes, but there is more.
The Second Error: Time Feeding Identity
The first error opens the door for you to linger on. But lingering is what the mountain wants. Fabrications, given time, harden into the identity. Buddhism has a way of explaining this: craving (taṇhā) leads to clinging (upādāna), which then leads to becoming (bhava).
Imagine a three-act play. In the first act, something dramatic happens. The hero gets hurt. Then begins Act II. The audience is curious. What is the hero going to do? How is he going to fight back? — they wonder.
But the hero is pacing in circles, muttering with excitement for a few minutes, and then doubting himself for the next few. The hero is clearly wailing. The audience sympathizes with what happened. Yet, they expect the hero to surprise them. They wait, wait, and wait. Some in the audience leave. But the hero is still pacing, doing nothing.
The audience clearly saw events unfold around the hero, which is why they expected him to move quickly into the next act. But for the hero, things appeared to be happening to him, directed at him. The hero didn’t see what the audience saw — he was wrapped up in his own stories. The audience can see the lingering; the hero can’t.
In that process, the first idea, “Great, I am free, and I can pursue all those things now,” becomes “I’m such a positive-minded person that I can seize opportunities in anything.” Then, in the future, when that hardened identity material encounters a situation where no such opportunity exists, it would not know how to deal with it and would succumb to suffering (duḥkha). Similarly, the fourth idea on performance becomes “I am such a failure,” which then becomes a dead weight on the shoulders. That’s suffering again.
This is a habitual chain from craving to clinging to becoming to suffering. That’s what the mind does when given time. The longer you linger on such thoughts, the harder it becomes to break the chain. We saw this in The Darker Mountain, where sadness became my sadness, uncertainty became my uncertainty, and the leadership challenge became my leadership challenge. Each return to an idea from that list adds a grain. The mountain wants the situation to be large because largeness is where it lives. The longer the rumination, the better for the mind to appropriate and harden the identity mountain. The mountain’s whole architecture is temporal — accumulated identity, projected futures, and narratives of becoming.
I knew better not to linger on that list for more than that day. Had I extended that afternoon into a weekend and then to a week, I wouldn’t be writing this essay right now. Yet, there is more. While writing this essay, I discovered another error. Let’s see what happens in Act III.
The Third Error: Action Requiring Identity
Finally, after a very long Act II, the play enters Act III. Having thought through and spent time on an emotional rollercoaster, the hero jumps into action with pomp and jubilation. He picks up one of those ++ thoughts from his list and turns to action. In my case, this is when I became the resilient one, the one who doesn’t waste time, who’s already building things and writing.
Back to the hero. The hero sincerely believed he needed a new identity before taking action. The time spent in Act II was necessary for him to rebuild his identity, which then became the driver of his actions. The hero needed a comeback narrative with a new resolute identity to move on to Act III. For him, the pacing and pep talks made him the resilient one for Act III. Therein lies an error.
The error is subtle to see — it is the belief that such appropriated fabrication from Act II is essential to enter Act III. Such a belief is unnecessary; the audience knows, but the hero does not. Which is why we form comeback narratives before beginning acting. As usual, the audience sees it, the hero does not, already consumed by his new resilient identity.
The error is subtle to see because harm occurs later or goes undetected. As I woke up a few days ago, my mind went back to some of the negatives on my list. My mind wanted to ruminate. I gently pulled back, knowing that the “new resilient” identity would start seeking vindication again. The harm is that it pulls you back into repeating these errors.
Only while writing this essay did I realize this error. I had been a party to this third error several times. Yet, I relied on some identity reification to be the resilient one to engage in new projects the Monday after.
The Closing
My list of positives and negatives gave me a framework to reflect. In self-help literature, choosing the positive ones reframes the situation and reflects a growth mindset. Picking the negative ones reflects a fixed mindset. It is easy to argue which side to pick. There are any number of books that tell you to pick the first.
But my reflection led me to the stage. The stage was what consumed the hero. But the audience was the one that caught the errors, and those errors stand between me and the proclamation that I’m now free to choose. The gap is wider than I had imagined. Audience clapping must wait until another time.