Creative Solutions - Life Coaching Penguins

We deny the feelings of wrongness, pass them off as just quirks, dismiss our mind’s natural method of defense. Somewhere, deep inside the folds, alarms are blaring and we aren’t listening because we have forgotten how. And perhaps that is where our dreams come in.

I belong to a forum where freedom-minded folks tend to flock. Get it? Flock? Of penguins? Sorry, bad pun. In any case we had a discussion thread going on the stories behind our monikers. One particular story stuck with me. Andrew a.k.a. PenguinsScareMe wrote:

“About eight years ago, I started having a recurring dream. This was the beginning of a sort of awakening in me that led me to the path I am on now.

In the dream, I'm at work or I'm driving down the road. A penguin appears. Maybe he's on the sidewalk, maybe he's standing in someone's front yard. It doesn't matter.

The point is, I see a penguin where a penguin should not be. I look around to see other people's reactions. The troubling thing is, nobody else has any reaction to it at all…maybe it was just a trick of light and shadow, and there really was no penguin there at all…

Soon I spot another penguin. I'm sure of it this time. Maybe it's at the grocery store, or in the parking lot. He's there, as plain as day, where everyone can see him. I turn to say to somebody, ‘Hey, look, a penguin!’ But before I open my mouth I realize that no one else sees. Everyone is just walking to and fro, paying no attention to the fact that an Arctic bird…is waddling among us.

That's when I start to get a little nervous. I was going to say something, but it dawns on me that if something that unusual was really happening, I wouldn't be the only one noticing. So I say nothing, and neither does anyone else.

Before long, I start seeing penguins around every corner. What bothers me is not so much that there are penguins, but that nobody else sees them. They begin to appear in twos and threes, and I can actually see people having to go out of their way to avoid tripping on them, but even then it's like they don't see the penguins.

Eventually I can't turn around without seeing a penguin. My nervousness turns to worry and finally to panic as ultimately the entire landscape is covered in penguins and no one sees them or acknowledges them in any way. All I want in the whole world is to see one person absolutely freak out and lose his s--t and scream, ‘Why doesn't somebody do something about all these penguins???’ But no one ever does.

Finally I wake up.”

You don’t need to see penguins in your dreams – perhaps it is just a gut feeling that you have. You don’t fit quite right in your job, you are lonely, you are overwhelmed, and the parts of your life that should be in your control seem to be out of whack and getting worse.

PSM’s description of his penguin dreams stuck with me. It seemed a perfect metaphor – something is wrong with the world, something is not right with how he/you/me fit into it.

There were many years when, despite that overwhelming feeling, I did my best to ignore it, hide from it, and continue on the proscribed course. I explained it away as a quirk from my upbringing – my dad always seemed to be doing something odd or living in some non-conformist way. Like so many young adults I looked at him and thought, “I don’t want to be like you.” (Sorry, Dad.)

I tried to convince myself that the sense of wrongness was simply my own mind playing tricks on me. Everything was fine, I just needed to get that promotion and that degree in business (blech!) that everyone else seemed to have and it would all be okay. I just needed to work harder, keep my mouth shut, learn some extra computer programs, volunteer myself for more tasks to ‘wow’ my supervisor, and take advantage of the company’s ‘internal education’ programs (double blech!).

After nearly seventeen years of working in offices for all kinds of industries and with all kinds of people I still found myself “seeing penguins” and I realized my gut had been right all along.

See the reality is that you can fit a square peg in a round hole. Pound on it long enough and the edges dent and break and chip. Eventually the square peg can be shoved and squeezed into that round hole. But it’s pretty beat up and damned ugly by the time it is done. That’s your soul we are talking about, the center of your happiness and goals and dreams. Bang it up enough and we lose those dreams – maybe even forever.

Andrew’s dreams of penguins are the perfect metaphor. His gut was screaming, “Wake up, man. Don’t go down that path! Round hole! Round hole! Dude…PENGUINS!!!!”

In the last century we have transformed ourselves from a predominantly agrarian society to one that is connected in every corner by technology. We live shoulder to shoulder with our neighbors, open land and silence have become strangers, and we haven’t had time to adapt. Is it any wonder you are holding this book now? Is it any wonder that we aren’t all dreaming of penguins?

The answer to changing your life sits inside you right now waiting to be heard. But with all the hum of technology and traffic and life, how well can we hear it?

Have you ever been startled by the overwhelming silence during a power outage? No humming of the refrigerator, computer or aquarium to distract you. Suddenly you can hear the cars zipping by from the highway that is two miles away.

Our lives and our thoughts fade into the background, lose their place in the flow of sound. Take a walk, find a quiet place and listen to that voice, that gut instinct that we all have. Be as still as possible and listen closely because it is rather unused to being heard.

Interested in reading more? Stay tuned, "Change Your Life" will be in print soon!