Tuning In
The First Step on the Path Toward Wholeness
The (Tuning) Fork in The Road
I’ve been getting back into guitars recently.
I’ve had an acoustic most of my life but recently was able to play a few electrics and mess around with different pedals. I was immediately hooked and have been researching and saving to buy my own set up since that moment.
This has been accompanied by a lot of time spent playing my acoustic and in that process, something struck me as applicable to more than just my guitar.
You can’t tune a string to itself.
You can turn the peg all you want but the string has no way of knowing it is in tune without some sort of external measure. A tuning fork, another instrument, heck even just another string.
I think this is also true in my pursuit of wholeness and likely your own pursuit as well.
We often treat wholeness like a strictly inside job. Get quiet enough, reflect enough, journal, pray, meditate, stretch, read enough and suddenly all of the scattered pieces of myself will present themselves ready and willing to be integrated once more.
This is what the entire self-improvement industry runs on. The answer is in there, you just have to find it.
And here’s the thing, I don’t think they’re wrong. At least not entirely wrong.
I love the internal work of integration (which is what it means to have integrity) but if I am integrating that means I must be integrating with something.
So, like a guitar string, I cannot tune to myself, I must have something outside of myself that I find worthy of tuning to. Something worth integrating with.
In an effort to be clear, when I say “something worth integrating with” what I mean is something that I am willing to do the hard work of bending myself to and the even harder work of resisting bending that thing to me.
Always Being Tuned
The challenge is this:
I am always integrating with something. I am always bending myself to fit some external picture of what it means to live a ‘good’ life.
Even if I’m not fully conscious of it.
And it isn’t until we’ve named the thing we’re integrating with, or tuning ourselves to, that we can take responsibility for what that thing is.
When we finally bring our image of the good life into the light of our awareness, we can examine it and only then can we really decide if it’s worth tuning to.
This is what the Mountain of Integrity is for, and it is why integrity is the first mountain we climb in pursuit of our vocation.
If we cannot name the thing we’re tuning to, if we cannot name the thing we’re integrating with, if we cannot give an answer to our vision of the good life, we have no destination and therefore no direction.
The thing you’re integrating with is your vision of the good life. It isn’t your goals, which shift with the season, and it’s not your preferences, which bend with your mood.
As I mentioned earlier, your vision of the good life is what you believe to be worth bending to.
So as much as I might say the good life includes prioritizing my physical health, what my actions consistently show me is that I believe the good life includes that fourth slice of pizza and a nap on the couch.
I am bending to the pizza couch version of the good life and not the physical health version of the good life.
Which is the real test of this whole thing:
Is your declared version of the good life and your lived version of the good life the same thing? Or are they dis-integrated?
A Small Practice
Here is a practice to get you started on the path. You’ll need a sheet of paper and something to write with.
To be fruitful, these questions require a level of honesty and self awareness. I encourage you to push to be real, it is all too human to deceive ourselves into thinking we believe something is true when our actions point to something entirely different.
Reflect on and answer the following questions in order:
What do I think it means to live a good life?
If someone were to observe me in every moment for one week, what would they say is my vision of the good life?
What would my closest people say is my vision of the good life? (bonus points if you text them and ask them right now).
When I see these “good lives” side by side, what jumps out at me? What is similar? What is different? How do I feel about that?
Closing
A tuning fork is useful precisely because it does not negotiate.
A440 is A440 whether you are having a good day or a bad one, whether the note is convenient or not.
That is what your vision of the good life should be for you.
And, here is the goodness in that:
Once you tune the first string on a guitar that string can be used to bring the whole instrument into harmony.
I think this is also true of our lives.
Once we begin to consciously integrate with something, it becomes much easier to bring the rest of our lives into harmony with it.
Your communities, your giftings, your goals, all of it become easier to figure out what belongs and what doesn’t.
Let me know what you think,
-Charlie