The Higher You Climb ...

Wow - what a couple of weeks! This has definitely been the busiest month for Bock's Office Transformational Consulting to date, so consequently the blogging has suffered just a bit. No excuses - it's all good!

As I've been working on my radio show (don't forget to tune in Sundays from 1:00 - 2:00 central at www.ndsu.edu/webradio to hear "You Already Know This Stuff"), I've had a lot of great opportunities to connect with friends old and new and to learn more about them as they share the songs they would pick to represent themselves and their lives.

As I think about that question for my own life, one song that keeps coming back to me is Dan Fogelberg's "The Higher You Climb." I found this great graphic representation of the lyrics of this song at vicky.com (thanks, Vicky!) and it really tells a lot about my life.

If you start at the bottom of the spiral and read up, you'll get the feel for the lyrics. As a recovering perfectionist (does one ever fully recover?), I've found this to be my path. The higher I climb, the more that I see; the more that I see, the less that I know. The less that I know, the more that I would want to know and the more that I yearned to know, the higher I would climb.

As I found myself climbing that never-ending spiral, I really did seem to need less and less, and there was a time in my life when I was pretty alone. For me, however, gratefully there has also come a point where I realize that I'm not on this spiral alone. The more people I meet, the fuller and richer is my life. So where this says "the fuller you feel, the less that you need," that can mean two things. Maybe I don't need as many external validations as I used to ... and maybe I really don't NEED anything more in my physical world. But I do find that I choose to interact with people on a much different level. The more I learn, the less I really do know, and the more I want to learn - but from others, not on my own.

This is a great life lesson for me - but not in ways I intended when I first heard this song in the mid '80s when I was still struggling to figure things out.

I certainly don't have them figured out now, but I have a whole new perspective on the journey.

If you have songs in your life that have left an impression on you, or that you might consider a theme for a portion of your life, please let me know. I'd love to play the song and the reason you chose that song on my radio show!