The risk for an Edgeworker is that their work may be for nothing.
At the end of one long and fantasy-stripping process, I was asked, “What if there is not enough people who want to grow up to save the world?” To which I answered that if one looks closely and soberly enough at the numbers and tipping points we have crossed, one may realized that it is already hopeless. “But so” she looked at me quizzically, “Why do the work? What’s the point? And, why do you train others to hold space for edgework if it is all hopeless?”
I have my own current answer for that question (that I do share in the video report above). In Radical Reality, there is no ‘right’ answer to the question ‘Why?’. Each edgeworker has to find that out for themselves.
So. Why do you do the work?
What reward have you used to keep you going? The reward that you will look professional or successful enough to please your father’s expectations? The reward that your friends will finally behave the way you want them to? Or the reward that you will be the one to have found the miracle door that saved someone from their suffering?
What if your work does not make one bit of difference in the great turning of events? What if your secret wish to be remembered as the person who changed the tide for humanity is a just that, an ego-fantasy? What if doing Edge-work takes you even further away from viral mass-validation?
Why do the work at all if you will not be rewarded?
These are the questions emerging in the field of the Year Long Spaceholder Training after three and half months of hitting bottom together.
If you ever investigate ‘why’, I do warn against finding an answer that would be contingent on external results. Using others as the compass of your work is a sure mean to pave your way into the hell that is the cycle of Expectations and Resentment. “I will keep going … if only I see results… if you people get what I am saying … if only they change … if only they grow up … if only they start creating … if only they appreciate me … if only I go viral … ” What if they don’t? Will you stop?
What, then, will you do?
