Showing Up and Letting Go

"The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are. Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy."-Joseph Campbell

I’m learning something new about “showing up.” I have spent years practicing the Four-Fold Way, thanks to Angeles Arrien.  In latter years, I’ve counted on the belief that if an elder could just “show up” as him or herself, such a person would change the world. It would happen automatically. Just by daring to be present completely, an old person could embody a different way of being. By “showing up,” one could exemplify choices and reveal possibilities. So, “showing up” has always been a powerful practice. It promised me a chance to serve by merely being myself.

A few years ago, when writing Embracing Life, I realized that the Four-Fold Way held possible synergies that could unlock even more energy. I could see then, what I am learning now. When we combine “showing up” with another practice from the Four-Fold Way, “surrendering attachment to outcome,” or letting go, it becomes something even more powerful. It seems that I can only “show up” so much, if I don’t let go of the outcome. This realization is changing my life, and making it more possible to experience a deeper meaning in Joe Campbell’s words.

An earlier experience of this quote left me feeling angry. I thought, as I read it, that Campbell was advocating for some kind of denial, a spiritual bypass of the agony in our world. I couldn’t imagine “joy” showing up in the same sentence with “the sorrows in the world.”

As I’ve grown older, that earlier attitude began to change. I could feel something like that in what was unfolding around me. Old people were growing happier. They were becoming more comfortable in their own skins, more free and expressive, less emotionally reactive and truer to themselves. At first, I was suspicious of these changes. They seemed to be the changes of the privileged, those who were insulated from the woes of the world. My own increasing happiness was suspect. I was, like my counterparts, ripening into a deeper me, and becoming happier to be me. Life seemed a better place. I wasn’t sure this was a good development.

I wasn’t convinced that my increasing sense of wellbeing and happiness represented an improvement. How could I be happier as the house I lived in was burning? “Surrendering attachment to outcome” seems like a bitter betrayal of the Life on this planet. It is tantamount to letting the house burn down. It may be an acknowledgement of what I’ve always known and haven’t liked; I am not in control. Things go their own way. But, giving in to reality, while a definite relief, seems like abandoning ship, surrendering the garden to the gophers, and becoming complacent at the critical hour.

Here’s where paradox, something I have been learning about, as I have grown older, is important. Letting go lets one be with Life, as it does what it will. The house may burn down, and everything I love may go with it, but I will no longer be denying what is true, which is, that Life is occurring here. I feel an increasing joy because of my obligation to Life. I know about what Joe Campbell calls “the sorrows of the world,” and I feel an obligation to respond to the call of the moment. I can do both.

Maybe once, as a less mature person, I held a black or white belief, that was an either/or way of seeing things, but now, as an aging person, I am privy to a perspective that is paradoxical, both/and, where my joy and the world’s sorrows coexist. I am happier, and that happiness is filled with grief. It is a more mature and complex form of happiness.

The miracle, for me, is that I couldn’t have gotten to this joy if I hadn’t learned to combine letting go (and paradoxically gaining the world) with “showing up.” I am present in this world of perfect imperfection, because I am no longer trying to make it conform to some idea of perfection I hold. I couldn’t have learned this lesson, if Life hadn’t insisted I live on Its terms instead of mine, and “showing up” and letting go, brings me to that lesson.

I’m still learning and happier for it.

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For more pieces like this, go to www.elderssalon.blogspot.com (2010 thru 2013) and http://www.elderssalon2.blogspot.com  (2014 on)

To hear archived versions of our radio program, Growing An Elder Culture, go to www.elderculture.com

To read excerpts, or otherwise learn, about Embracing Life: Toward A Psychology of Interdependence go to http://www.davidgoff.net

The Wild Kingdom

I am a critter, a wild being of nature. I come in the form of a social animal. I’m a complex organism coupled with this environment and unimaginably adaptive. I have evolved here.  I have been endowed by nature with a strange combination of abilities.  My kind is still evolving. I have a complex form of consciousness that pervades nature, but seems to reside with difficulty among my kind. The irony is that many of us think we are domesticated, tame, but I don’t. I think the wild permeates my nature. I know it.

There was a time, it has been much of my life, when I didn’t know how much of a part  of nature, I am.  You see, I grew up among other wild beings that mistakenly assumed that they had slipped the noose of being an animal; a part of the larger whole of teeming Life. I was brought up to believe that I was separate, special, and ultimately tame. Life, in these latter years, has shown me the hubris in me and in my kind.

The years I felt separated from Nature, from my deepest self, were painful, for many reasons, but none more so than the feeling of uncertainty I have had about belonging. I was lost, a member of a species that had lost touch with the dignity and beauty of its place within Nature. I learned the ways of not belonging, of distrust. I suspected others, the environment, Life, and most painfully, myself.

The years have piled up. The heartache of not belonging became normal. Environmental degradation just became a typical aspect of being an unnatural being. Alienation, the emptiness of not belonging, became a way of life. I was savvy enough to know better, but not developed enough to be better. I just limped along cut-off from my own nature, in fact, cut-off from most everything.

Today is different. Oh, the pain of feeling lost goes on! For all too many, Life still seems to be distant and retreating. The blood that surged in the most primitive part of my brain restored my animal nature. In civilized terms I lost a lot, but I was held onto by Life. In animal terms, I was bestowed with an experience of my true nature. Since then I have been fascinated with human nature, aware in a strange way, of my place, as a human being within the whole of Life.

Being an animal amongst humans isn’t easy. Besides the huge distrust that is everywhere, governing too many human relations, there is an insistence, even by those who claim an informed perspective, that the human being is so alienated, that almost nobody but the enlightened soul is capable of becoming one with Nature. I would suggest otherwise, but few will listen. Alienation runs deep now. Fleas know my blood is good, but other humans don’t recognize my animal nature. There is the heartache of not belonging, and the additional but different, heartache of belonging.

Life has taken on a more instinctive feel now. I know things with a kind of certainty that I never had before. Don’t get me wrong. I know I have a kind of pretend certainty, that comes from the arrogant, hubristic mind I developed to protect my self in the detached world I had lived in, but now, when I meet some new person on the trail, its like I have smelled their butt. I know who I can trust and why.  I can walk into a room filled with other human beings, and sense how things are going.  I have reason to believe these are innate aspects of my own human-animal nature that have been with me all along, but have been overlooked in my rush to become civilized.

Ageing is deepening this sense. I believe my proximity to death and Life are ripening me. They are aiding my process of returning to my true nature. As I, like many old people, become more unconventional and less defined by the larger culture, I find myself, growing wilder. With greyness has come a kind of freedom that one only has in the wilderness. I like it; at last, I’m getting to be what I am.

My inner life is blossoming. The process of being a civilized animal held me by focusing enormous stakes on surfaces. I have escaped the bondage of roles, rules, and of having to preserve myself as an economic being. Now, that which has always been within me is bursting forth. It’s like spring in a high mountain meadow. The true part of my true nature is welling up from within. I like this development.

All in all now, when I am with a group of humans and we are sharing some kind of project, I know that I am in the midst of wild things. I am on vision quest in the human wilderness. I am excited, humbled and thrilled to have returned to the herd, an elder, savvy and wild, because nature made me this way.

Making Solitude out of Loneliness

Once upon a time, not that long ago, I feared the corrosive effects of being alone. I didn’t really have a life of my own, and so I wanted to avoid the empty, hollow times when I was forced by unavoidable circumstance to experience loneliness. I know from experience how this season, the holiday season around Christmas and New Years, is fraught with images of family and connection. It is a time when loneliness, the feeling of being without, or beyond, meaningful connection is particularly hard. So, I feel compelled to write, at this time, to affirm what I have learned, the precious opportunity that loneliness presents, and the genuine hardship that comes along with it.

I spent some Christmases alone. Notice, I’m referring to more than one. I’ve had a chance to drink deep of the bitter seasonal ale, the one that ferments in one’s lonely heart.

I will be spending this New Years alone. The feel of this time coming, contrasts so sharply with those days of the past. I was alone then in a painful heartbreaking way, now my aloneness blankets me with comfort, love, and support. I want to write about the difference, to remind myself of what once was, and to make sure I’m clear about how I made the change. My well-being relies upon staying clear about how a lame, broken and fearful man was converted into a sparkling and energetic mystery.

Aloneness was always a sign of my inferiority, of my inadequacy. I don’t know why. I could speculate about it. I’m sure I could come up with some compelling theories now, but then, it just felt like something must be wrong with me. I know I suffered a kind of dread about being alone. Loneliness came, despite me. I’ve gone from quaking before the possibility, to seeking it. Transitioning from one kind of experience, and one kind of attitude, to another, has been a great gift I gave myself. This gift has rebounded to others as well. How this happened, I want embossed in my soul, and available to others, because something quite miraculous lies deep within the alchemy of this change.

I learned to love myself. That would not have happened so clearly for me if I hadn’t been alone. Loneliness became solitude, because no one else was around to distract me. I sat in my own juices, some might say, “my own shit,” until I started to feel some compassion for what I was doing. The loneliness turned, it became something else, something friendlier and more supportive, because I had to face myself. I not only came to terms with me, but I began to hold my life as on-going miracle. Solitude began, when I realized that I, despite my fear and distaste, was always present. Solitude became something I hadn’t expected. There was someone in the silence, someone who heard my complaining soul, someone who stayed with me, and someone who eventually calmed me down.

I didn’t take to being loved, especially by me. I kept thinking, “it was a dirty job,’’ that “someone had to do it.” I wanted someone else to have to do it (this was no favor). But, no one else was around. Loneliness, the absence of anyone else, brought me to my self.  Now, thanks to that unwelcomed development, I know that I never leave my side. I am now never truly alone. I have reluctantly become self-possessed. I am accompanied now, never alone, happy to have time with the one who stands inside me, even when I am quivering. I am now full in a way I was never before, and it is because I couldn’t run away from me.

Loneliness became solitude, and solitude became desirable when I discovered that inside myself lives a being making my life a desirable mystery. I want to know, and be, this man, as much as possible. Solitude has become an everyday thing. It is my way of staying true to the one within me. My new world of social relations is enriched by the presence of this one. I am alive as never before.

Solitude has become an inner love affair. I want to spend time with myself. I don’t have much fear of a time of looking at my life, evaluating whether I made good use of it, because now I have the only real compass that was ever granted to me. I am, in part, what I am created to be. I chuckle now, remembering how much I wanted to hide from myself, how much I feared being who I was, I am happy now, as an ageing man, because ripeness is setting in, and it all came through being alone. Loneliness became solitude. I became myself. The world opened. The miraculous became more evident.