The ‘Have-Do-Be’ Inversion

Looking around at the modern world, I notice a quiet but powerful inversion at work in how many of us are living.

We have come to organise our lives around the belief that we must first Have- the salary, the house, the credentials, the visible markers of a life going well, so that we can then Do- the travelling, the achieving, the producing, the projects that signal a life being lived, in order, eventually, to Be the person we sense ourselves wanting to become.

It is a sequence so widely shared that we rarely notice we are following it. And yet, looked at squarely, it is the precise reverse of how anything in the natural world actually unfolds.

Nothing in nature Has before it Is.

Nothing Does before it Is.

Being is the soil. Doing is what grows from it. Having is what the doing, in its season, eventually yields.

The Authentic pattern at the heart of FEWA suggests the same order: first Be the self that is genuinely yours, then Do what follows naturally from that being, and then Have, or more truthfully, receive, what arrives in accordance with the integrity of the pattern.

It sounds simple. It is not the path most of us are on.

What troubles me about the inverted sequence is not that it is materialistic, exactly, since that would be too easy a charge and not quite the right one.

What troubles me is whose Being it is finally serving.

When we put aside the authentic self in order to concentrate on Having, having the public persona, having the reputation, having the possessions we have decided will be the resource for the Doing of the life we want, we are, in effect, handing the eventual Being over to the construct-led shadow self rather than to the authentic self that was its rightful owner. The Persona becomes the architect, the Shadow accumulates everything that did not fit the design, and the authentic self, who was meant to be the one Being anything at all, is left somewhere outside the building it was supposed to live in.

This is the recipe, I think, for the particular flavour of modern unhappiness that does not respond to more achievement or more acquisition, the narrative of lack, frustration, and quiet disappointment that persists even when, by every external measure, things are going well.

I am not moralising, I genuinely do not know how anyone steps clear of the pattern entirely, but I do find myself wondering, when the Having and the Doing are finally complete, who will get to own the Being that results.

The authentic self, who has waited patiently for its turn, or the construct that has been quietly running things all along?

One conciliatory factor, which I would like to offer on this is admiration for the inner resource that we have, to accomplish and attain material standing in this world.

The reason that I say this is that some of us may 'half-admit' that it is a mediation between the 'ego' and the 'super-ego', to resolve the felt tension between the two.

One striving to be strong and manage our needs, the other constructing a persona that helps us to operate amongst the social environment that we necessarily inhabit.

Hitting the road, as I am doing has always been to me a deeply felt expression of my nature.

Sure, there’s an element of seeking, of trying to find my tribe.

But fits nicely into the Be-Do-Have pattern.

I really feel like a traveller, what I was born to ‘Be’.

So that’s what I’ll ‘Do’

What I receive, or ‘Have’ as I go along?

Well none of us will have anything right at the end, so there’s nothing to lose

And everything to gain.

If the road's worth following, there's a way to [travel along]. Either way, thanks for reading — see you at the next border.

Don’t forget to check out my book at https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1837097097