When Shift Happens: Feeling 'At Home' Doing Less

The concept of home and place is so vital to the fabric of our lives. But what happens when home no longer feels like "home" and you begin to question your place, both professionally and personally, in the world?

Oh, such heady questions. I found these compelling issues all the more interesting ever since I embarked upon writing the memoir "Grace Revealed," which was released earlier this year, and is now suddenly seeing a rise in sales. All that is good, however I can not escape the irony in which I find myself—an author/producer/media savvy whatever ...who had been writing about his own explorations of home and place, as well writing about homeless Polish people during the 1940s, who suddenly finds himself in between homes, a "conventional media job" and a new outlet to direct my energies.

A new book is on the way. So is a web series and a film version of the book, in some fashion, however, what happens to "professionals" when the roads they have long been traveling on suddenly detours toward the Slowing Down and Sitting Still? For a while, anyway.

This happened to me earlier this year, when the winds of fate found me turning down a slick media job in Palm Springs. I opted to take the baton the Universe handed me instead and fled to Maui to oversee a colleague's olive tree grove. It made absolutely no sense. Which was why I did it.

There were 300 new olive trees there—and for those of you that know anything about olive trees, they typically take five years to come into fruition. Talk about patience–something I fear is sadly lacking in much of today's modern media flurry. In any case, I was to be a good steward to those trees while the owners left the property for several months. So, I just trusted that something else was at work in my life–something other than me and my drive to arrive somewhere in my career. I left everything and everyone I knew back on the Mainland and landed on Maui, burnt out and awfully curious. And when I say everything, I do, in fact, mean everything—career, home, life as I knew it. My belongings now fit into a dozen boxes and have taken up temporary residence in a storage shed somewhere in Northern California. I left "corporate media" on the 20th anniversary of my mid-life crisis—which I launched long ago to get out of the way (alas, it lingered)—and woke up in Maui. Not a bad place to open your eyes, I suppose.

And so, for many weeks, I Eat-Pray-Loved myself into a cosmic spiral. I meditated more, journaled more, met new people, and tended to the young olive orchard in the bucolic Maui upcountry portal called Kula. Tending to the olives afforded me an opportunity to slow down—more than I have slowed down before—and pay attention (in a new way). The olive trees are good teachers, after all. They take years to grow and come into fruition so it's not as if one day you wake up and suddenly—boom, bam, there be olives on the trees! Eureka!  No, Mother Nature knows what the heck She is doing. She can take her time. 

As a result, in just a short amount of time, I came to realize that the life I had prior to coming to Maui was often filled with a never-ending swirl of "doing." In the past two decades, I penned five books—two which are published—oversaw creative direction of a newspaper for 14 years, wrote articles about Hollywood for magazines, covered red carpet Hollywood events, took three to four Bikram yoga classes a week, breathed in, out, and God knows where else, and taught a series of fitness classes, dripping in perspiration to arrive somewhere every step of the way (more or less). So there on Maui, as I reflected back on that era, I realized two major things. 1) That I rarely took the time to fully integrate all that I had accomplished and all that happened to me and the people around me—you know, as in, honor it. And 2) That somewhere in there, I lost the Me that was having fun being a creative person. I began to crave the acceptance and recognition from the outside world (more). I was, in effect, waiting for the outside world to tell me: "Oh my God, Greg ... you've arrived! At last. Welcome! Here's a coupon for 20 percent off on the finest chocolate! Gosh... we sure dig you!"

Funny thing is, whenever "the world" did "validate," me, I rarely allowed it to fully sink in. And that's the downright funky thing about that "I WANT" pattern. It has a voracious appetite and just keeps wanting—MORE.

We are often told that acceptance and love are an inside job, but are are rarely told that in the process of true self-acceptance and self-love we must confront our shadow side, which, let's face it, is not often glamorous. (Or so we think.) For me, the shadow is the place where Fear, Doubt, Worry and Shame, to note but four, seem to have been having one hell of a house party. My occasional (fine ... lingering) resistance to facing these crafty creatures forced my mood to swing with reckless abandon—at times. But I came to believe that there is something lush and wonderful to be had if we simply allow ourselves to just sit in our own shadow. By allowing ourselves to face what is most frightening, it loses its stronghold on us.

Perhaps this is when we find home within us. Perhaps this is the "coming home" that many other writers have written about–the arrival of finding oneself and feeling truly comfortable in one's own skin. 

Over the last month, after returning to the Mainland to partake in three significant book-related lectures about home and place and epigenetics and more, I realized that the frantic push to arrive somewhere was not active in me at all. I was just more present and much more alive in the moment. A good thing indeed. But none of this would have been possible had I not taken the time to DO NOTHING and sit and reflect on all the experiences I had accumulated.

I sense many creative people right now, especially authors out there, hope to find an audience for their work. Along the way, however, I suspect one thing must happen: we must welcome ourselves into the room as the first person in the audience lest we lose ourselves in a never-ending spiral of hoping to arrive somewhere and remain relevant in these changing times.