Becoming a person of depth

Electronic communication has radically changed our lives…We can all be reached all the time. There never needs to be any silence and solitude in our lives. And so we end up as good people, but as people who are not very deep: not bad, just busy; not immoral, just distracted; not lacking in soul, just preoccupied; not disdaining depth, just never doing the things to get us there.

Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

I find that it is getting much harder to identify a person of depth in our culture. I don’t quite know how to explain what I mean by ‘a person of depth’, but I think we all know it when we see it. When I think about the people that I would classify as ‘people of depth’, they are the ones who have gone through tragedies and difficulties that have forced them to stop and reflect on their lives, often in isolation or at least withdrawn from the crowds. People of depth don’t seem to be partaking in the rat-race of our culture; they aren’t busy trying to climb the corporate ladder or travel around the world. They might be doing really well at work and have traveled to many places, but there is a confidence and contentment within them in that that is not what they place their value in – not in what company they’re working at or what parts of the world they’ve been to.

I particularly like the way David Brooks puts it in his book The Road to Character:

Occasionally, even today, you come across certain people who seem to possess an impressive inner cohesion. They are not leading fragmented, scattershot lives. They have achieved inner integration. They are calm, settled, and rooted. They are not blown off course by storms. They don’t crumble in adversity. Their minds are consistent and their hearts are dependable. Their virtues are not the blooming virtues you see in smart college students; they are the ripening virtues you see in people who have lived a little and have learned from joy and pain…They possess the self-effacing virtues of people who are inclined to be useful but don’t need to prove anything to the world: humility, restraint, reticence, temperance, respect, and soft self-discipline.

As the first quote indicates, I think becoming a person of depth in our culture is becoming increasingly hard. And it is because we’re constantly seeking out new excitements, the next adventure, the next location to visit, the next high impact and high reward job. But a life of character, of depth is not built on chasing these excitements and mountaintops but on growing in contentment with where you’re at, on being deeply rooted and fully present in a community, and on being faithful and perseverant even in the midst of boring routines.

You cannot build a life of depth by constantly surrounding yourself with new people and experiences – you need to take time to stop, to reflect, and to have solitude. Isn’t this why yoga and meditation retreats have suddenly become so popular in our culture? We’re beginning to realize that this rushing to and from one gathering or location to the next is just making us feel frazzled, incomplete, and shallow when the event or trip comes to a close and we start planning or looking for the next high in our next trip. But as with everything else, our culture has turned silence and solitude into just another exciting experience, not a lifestyle. We treat these meditation/yoga retreats like a drug – it calms the symptoms of our busyness and restlessness for a period of time, but it doesn’t fix the root of our problem.

A life of depth requires habitual practice, discipline, and transformation of the mindset into one in which we are okay with not doing anything exciting or not filling up our days with social gatherings and weekend trips. It’s a bit counter-intuitive and potentially scary, though, to stop ourselves from being busy for a few reasons –

We are a culture of people who’ve bought into the idea that if we stay busy enough, the truth of our lives won’t catch up with us.

Brené Brown

1. I think some of us are afraid to be by ourselves, alone with our thoughts, because we’d have to face some questions we don’t know the answers to and would rather not face at the moment – questions around where our life and where our relationships are headed. Or perhaps we’re afraid to be alone because we’re afraid that that is our true state – not truly known by anyone. Or maybe it is because we’ve already believed the lie that being busy equates to being important and if we stop being busy, we will suddenly become irrelevant and unimportant (source).

There’s a congenital disquiet inside us that is, today, being fanned to a high flame by the culture: one thousand television channels are within our reach, the Internet brings the whole world into our private rooms, and there are always new movies that we have not seen…sporting events that seem on everyone’s mind, and every kind of special event…to distract us. Beyond that, everyone around us seems to be traveling, doing interesting things, meeting interesting people.

Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

2. Social media makes us increasingly aware of all the events, movies, and travel locations that we are currently missing out on. The fear of missing out creates within us a sense of restlessness, and it’s difficult to foster a life of depth and reflection when one is constantly in the midst of this restlessness, because the fear of missing out makes it hard to stop, and in order to stop and reflect, it is necessary that we inevitably miss out on some events.

3. Our culture makes it hard for us to stop and foster a steady state in our lives. We’ve begun to believe that work, friendships, relationships, and events have to be interesting or exciting to be worth our time. But this makes for very transient people, because nothing can or should sustain excitement for too long. Take relationships for example. In the beginning, in the honeymoon phase, everything’s exciting, everything’s new, everything’s interesting. But the deepest relationships (and I think the best ones), whether in family, marriage, or friendships, are the ones where you’ve built intimacy through consistently being present. Taking your child to an amusement park everyday might be fun, but it isn’t sustainable for building intimacy; rather, it is the parent who is present when at home, who takes the time to ask everyday how the child is doing and who is intentionally part of the child’s daily life who is able to grow intimacy with the child.

At a certain deep level of relationship the real connection between us takes place below the surface of our conversations. We begin to know each other through presence.

Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

I love this quote by Augustine on relationships and love, where he emphasizes that deep intimacy is grown by being faithfully present over time. It is not about constant excitement and new experiences –

Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being “in love” which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.

St. Augustine

So what’s keeping us from taking the necessary times of solitude and reflection to become people of depth? I suppose the first question we should ask is if we even want to become people of depth. My guess is that most of us would like to be, at some point in our lives, one of those with “impressive inner cohesion”, but that is far down the road … for when we are 40, 50, or 60. But a life of depth starts now; our current disciplines or lack of disciplines, our current lifestyle choices, our current priorities – they all place us on a specific life trajectory. If we desire to be a person of depth 10 years down the line, then we need to start making some life changes and plans to set us on that trajectory.

Most of us have clearer strategies for how to achieve career success than we do for how to develop a profound character.

The Road to Character

Most of us have some picture of where we’d like to be in our career 10 years down the line, do we have an idea as well of what type of person we’d like to be in 10 years?