Unbidden

It’s Christmas morning. I am alone. Well not exactly, the three wise men are here. The Magi are my only decorations. With them, I see the sunlight, and am embraced by the silence. The morning casts a spell, and I fall into a reverie. I find myself thinking about the many gifts I have received over the course of this lifetime. Gifts, I didn’t even know were coming, and sometimes, didn’t even recognize until much later. They all came unbidden.

I could easily say the best gifts are unexpected ones. Life is full of them. This morning I’m noticing.  Gratitude is toothless, until it recognizes the great flow that keeps coming towards us. It is amazing! A friend was describing watching the growth of his infant grandson, he observed this child learning to reach for something. Each movement revealed possibilities, which eventually led the child to be able to touch what it desired. The Life coursing through that child organized itself into action and eventual mastery.

Fulfillment, like desire, is a gift that comes naturally. Life is like that, it keeps delivering.

Strangely, while sitting here, all alone, I am able to grasp perhaps the greatest gifts of all — the things, sometimes they are only feelings, that alter the course of my life. All of them have been unexpected miracles. Some have been wrapped in grief and pain. I didn’t want those gifts. They came all the same. Twisting me all around, giving me a perspective I wouldn’t have sought out. I’ve seen some light, and it isn’t always fun. But, it is always educative. I’m better able to reach now.

The unbidden has been my benefactor and my bane. Life wouldn’t be life without the surprises, that show me how off balance I am. What flows toward me is always more than I can handle, and it introduces me to myself. Talk about a gift! I am not just what I imagine.

Neither are you. If I’m willing to know it, like I am today, then I am confronted by another surprising gift. Loneliness has its benefits. The view can be breathtaking. Unbidden, a vision can come. All of a sudden, a lonely reverie can turn into an important moment, a surprise recognition. Life, we know, works in strange ways. Unbidden, Mystery walks in the door, invisible but palpable — light afoot, with heavy consequence.

Everything changes, and nothing changes. I am alone as ever, and I am full of an emptiness I can’t understand, or command. And, its spilling everywhere. Unbidden, my life is being swept into the unimaginable. 

The gifts I have received have altered me, they have overwhelmed me, short circuiting some of my dreams, and made me recall others. Unbidden, comes the recognition that I am being cared for, that the Universe is doing a job on me, and that something greater than the Christmas Spirit is goosing me on. I sit and marvel, and wonder, how could I do anything else, and then I do. Unbidden.

Like Music and Dance

I’ve been engaged in the effort to overcome a pattern of arrogance that has haunted me, and undermined most of what I have valued throughout my life. The learning process, has been hard, humiliating, discouraging, and extremely educative. In some strange way, the darkness has shined a light on a surprising awareness. The obvious is not always so obvious. At least not to the arrogant.

I was able to make sense of a family pattern of protective inflation that I’d inherited. I thought I was better than everyone, because that had been the traditional way of dealing with the threat of inferior feelings in my family for centuries. I was a good son of the Goff family. I was arrogant, proud, and subtle with my dishonesty. In other words, I hid well. That is good, in public, external ways — but not so good in personal intimate terms. Arrogance is a bad seedbed for loving.

As you can imagine, it has been very deflating to see this. Grief and regret accompany me, like the angels that haunted Scrooge. They accompany me, and remind me of the graveyard.

All of this sadness has had a purpose. It is sensitizing me. The water of culture, that I have been swimming in, is becoming more visible and nuanced. For instance, I can now see how my tendency toward arrogance (which first grew out of my family’s sense of inferiority) lent itself well to a cultural reliance on authority. I went from secretly feeling inferior, like I didn’t belong, to being trained as a professional helper. I became a valued commodity, a knowledge pro, someone who could be looked to for guidance. This is a great place for an arrogant one to hide. There is nothing so disguising as being socially sanctioned.

The training even convinced me, that if I knew something, I must be valuable. I went from a wrong sense of inferiority to an equally wrong sense of inflated rightness. I was a valued cultural caricature of expertise — the embodiment of the reliance on knowing that infects our times. I was so well hidden that I hardly knew myself. I came to believe that by being transplanted into a valued member of society. I had overcome the family uncertainty.

Learning how untrue that is  —  has been one of the greatest and most humiliating boons of this re-orienting process. To some extent, some of the cultural trance has worn off. I can see that the metaphor of the journey, the endless pursuit of some sense of something to come, has prevented me from enjoying the moment. I have been so goal-oriented, that I’ve been missing out on what is going on around me. Instead of playing, I’ve been trying to prove myself in societal terms.

I have been brought by a deeply chagrining self-revelation, to an awareness, that my arrogance is part of a larger arrogance, a cultural assumption that life is really about achievement. It is the goal-less — the momentary dance —  that really carries the energy of delight, and alignment with the larger processes of life. In my family pattern of arrogance, and then later in the cultural pattern of arrogance (the reliance on knowing), I missed the boat.

Joy is in the music of the moment, the expanded now, that some elders are capable of experiencing. Joy isn’t in becoming, there isn’t any salvation project that can deliver it, it’s in being, taking the moment more fully in. In my arrogance, in my family’s misdirected attempts, in our culture’s glorification of knowledge to be gained, is an abiding failure. Life is playing through us — dancing to a music that has no goal but delightful beauty. 

Differing

“Every aspect of tragedy must be the bones 

supporting the rest of life, 

What I cling to… is the belief that difficulties are what makes it honorable and interesting to be alive.”

                                                                                  Florida Scott-Maxwell (84)

                                                                                       FromThe Measure Of My Days (published in1968)

Differing can be so problematic that it holds a lot of evolutionary potential. 

I’ve experienced, and promoted, a lot of hurt, because of confused assumptions, misunderstandings, and wrong judgements. The hurting caused by these insensitivities seems to define us as human beings. It seems that we humans don’t respond well to differences. Almost all of our wars, that have ravished us throughout our history, have to do with being different from one another. My own experience of relationship pain has been mostly about how we differ. So, I’ve come to see this as a particularly difficult and high potential phenomena for attention.

I have believed that this was an issue, that with enough attention, one outgrew. Elders seem to be particularly gifted when it comes to differing (see page 93 of The Evolving Elder). Now I see it another way. I think this is an issue that is an evolutionary driver. In other words, I don’t think it has a once and for all solution. It is something that requires one to live with tension. One can go too far, one way, towards intolerance of all differences, and the other way, towards obliviousness, and ignorance of important differences. The goal is to get comfortable enough, to be capable of holding difference long enough, to recognize them, and ferret out their true benefits.

I think about the journey that diversity and difference has set me upon. I am an average white male, born American in 1948. When I think of the distance in tolerance between me and my grandfather, a Klansman, I can’t help thinking about Star Trek. I’ve been beamed into the future. I am more accepting of differences than he could have ever been, and I’m still learning so much about how they manifest. I’m not exactly color-blind, but I’m a whole lot more comfortable with issues of race, religion, or gender. Because of my age and disabilities, the prejudices I’m most familiar with, have to do with disability prejudice, and its other form, ageism. Thanks to my relationships I’m also learning about personal differences, which manifest more as differences in awareness, reality, and beliefs.

Differing now seems to me an important and edgy enterprise. Our uniqueness, and gift to each other, depends upon it, and our sense of belonging and connection, challenges it. And each of us gets to live within the uncertainty that differing generates. Holding on to yourself, and letting go at the appropriate moments, caring for another, it’s all so complicated. There isn’t a final solution, or even a resting awareness, there is only a deep and humblingly educative engagement. Humans fall down, people get hurt, whether you do grapple with differing or not. I certainly have fallen prey to both sides of differing: hurting and hurt.

Our ancestors never got to contend with this issue much. They tended to live in enclaves of alikeness, what I now call communities of affinity. We can’t take them as models. Our well-being, culturally and personally, depends upon us learning how to embrace differences without giving up our own. The Earth, and all of its children, are depending on us to learn how to differ well.

Differing is one of the places where I have most to learn.