Precocious

I used to joke, about being an elder. “Chronologically I’m an infant elder, but experientially I’m precocious.” I still say it sometimes, because it still feels true. But now, when I say it, I’m not joking, and I’m not exactly sure how I feel about being this way. I looked up the word precocious to see what it meant, and if I was using the word right. The word refers to someone who is “ahead of their time.” I don’t know how this applies to a senior citizen, but it does seem like there is a way that I seem to be ahead of my own development. I don’t actually know how to write, or even think about that, but I feel like I have to try. I don’t exactly know why. I tend to think it is presumptuous. It seems to me to be more than a little precocious to write about being precocious.

Officially someone who is precocious is supposed to be more developed than their age. I guess that is true of me. I don’t think it is something I sought out, or feel like I can take any credit for. Somehow the Great Mystery deemed that I had to go through a long period of being perched on death’s doorstep, so I could be brought back, through no efforts I was capable of, with a form of consciousness that reminds me daily how powerless I am in life. If I am really in any way precocious it is because I know this life is not my life, but Life’s life. That isn’t the kind of knowing anyone seeks, especially if it means being held close to death.

I sometimes think being precocious, in the way I seem to be, is a gift. I get to feel a lot of things. Sometimes I can make this awareness useful. I get inspired and just feel awe. At other times I think of this awareness as a curse. I have to feel things I would rather not. I can’t always make useful what besieges me. I feel happy when I am able to serve my community through this awareness. At other times I just feel grief, because I know no way to digest, and make palatable, what assails me. I alternately feel deeply embedded in the whole, and desperately alone, and drowning in an immense emptiness.  So far, it looks like both are real, they seem to coexist, and I have to travel through them.

Being precocious is not my doing. I know it. Life made me this way. I remember telling the doctor I had at Stanford, that I always wanted to be special, but when he told me that they (the doctors) had never seen a condition like mine, and didn’t know how to treat me, then I realized I was special in away I had never anticipated. I feel the same way now. I am precocious not the way I want, but in some way that Life wants.

I am simultaneously thrilled to be called in this way and horrified that it means in some way that I am a freak — a freak of nature. Being disabled is freakish enough, but being strangely enabled is really freaky. I am not writing these words, doing this exploration, to complain.  I’m doing it to genuinely wonder what my being is doing here, how does it serve that I am like this? I fear that I am a freak, some natural anomaly, but secretly I think that actually I am the exception that proves the point. I believe the feelings that assail me, feelings of incredible connection, are part of what it means to be fully human. I believe that a kind of emotional intelligence about ourselves, and each other, is part of our natural inheritance. I think I am twisted in this way to serve to remind us all of this aspect of who we are. In that sense, I’m not an anomaly, only a reminder.

Precociousness then is a memory aid. For a time, some people have forgotten what they are capable of.  The arc of human development includes an emotional awareness of the fact that we exist because something, something big and mysterious, has employed Life to make sure we exist. I’m grateful that I get to know this much, I tend to think the crazy reality we live in has lulled us to sleep, to fearfully forget what we already know.

I don’t know what anyone’s purpose is for being here. But, I do know that there is a purpose —a scouting mission to the edge — and that each life is precious, because that mystery is embedded in it. Being precocious is a tolerable inconvenience compared to that kind of awareness.

I founder, in a very human way, under the weight of what is being asked of me. I live in constant admiration of how others have shouldered their own weights, and I take hope that I can handle mine, because others let me see what they struggle with. If I am precocious its only to remind us all that we have passed this way before —it is within us, to know why we are here.

Social Coercion

A friend of mine, a co-host on our radio show, had no more than uttered these words “social coercion”, when the part of me that is looking for possible Slow Lane material started up. I don’t know exactly why these words agitated me so. I’m hoping to find out as I reflect upon what got stirred within me. All I know for sure is that I could smell something that was more complex than it seemed. I think I gravitated to it much like the salmon is drawn back to its spawning place.

Social coercion. That sounds so much like being bullied by the masses. I guess for some it is. It implies that actions are the result of others. This is an anti-democratic nightmare. Somebody manipulates others to have their will. It is no wonder that groups are not trustworthy. The social arena is full of this harmful possibility. People worry because social coercion is everywhere; from advertising, political spin, religious proselytizing and all forms of fixing, healing and converting. The world of social connection is full of it. 

There is a necessary evil that haunts us as a social animal (social coercion), so much so that I think we would rather demonize it than learn to deal with it. In other words, social coercion is a natural phenomenon in a world of connection. Throwing it out, or acting surprised and intolerant of it, would be like throwing the baby out with the bath water. I don’t think my friend was doing anything like this when he mentioned social coercion, but my antenna went wild, because we live in such a fragmented culture, and there is so much distrust around, that I could believe someone might argue that if we could put an end to social coercion we might have a saner more humane world.

As you probably can tell, I think social coercion is one form of that which binds each of us to the other. Relationship necessarily involves enough pushing and shoving so that all parties can learn, if they want to, how to take care of themselves. Relationship, if it is the real deal, involves realities colliding; a certain amount of jousting to find out what is possible. If coercion, taking one’s own position and advocating for it, was looked at a path to social hell, then we as a species would be so cut-off, and so isolated that we could no longer consider ourselves to be social animals.

Maybe this isn’t common knowledge, or it isn’t something people actually grasp, but each of us lives in a bubble we call reality. This bubble is composed of everything we see and believe in. The world we live in is partially composed of the bubble (worldview) we apply to it. From the world we create with our bubbles comes our sense of self. The science of human development reveals that maturation involves giving up one bubble (the partial worldview), and sense of self you have, for a more complex, more complete bubble (another less-partial worldview), and a more capable, functional self. The great spiritual practices are based upon the same recognition. Reality becomes more real, more as it is, as we give up our insistences that it conform to our constructs. Life, more or less, coerces us out of blindness into the light.

People give up their bubbles for various reasons, sometimes it’s voluntary, sometimes it’s not. In the meantime all of these bubbles coexist and press on each other. Social reality is made up of multiple coexisting bubbles, upon which, there are also multiple identities — selves trying to live up to their worldviews. To be true to oneself in this kind of tumultuous free for all social space is hard. And, this hardship, plus exposure to all of these partial worldviews, is just what humans need to grow and become what they are capable of being. The tumult, including what can be considered social coercion, tempers us, and confers upon us the choices we must make to become ourselves.

Social coercion is a complex phenomenon. I’d like to do away with some forms of it (for example gang or fraternity hazing rites) but I’m concerned that that would weaken our social immune system and leave us even more vulnerable to toxic worldviews. I think that social coercion begs not to be stopped, but to be out grown. The more solid I am, the more confident I am in my own worldview (bubble), the less I worry about coercion. Paradoxically, this strength or confidence, comes from regularly and completely rubbing shoulders with this sea of others who hold differing viewpoints. The most useful response to social coercion is through exposure to social coercion.

I am more worried about the impulse to limit the pressures of social coercion, than I am concerned about social coercion. I know a lot of damage has been done, especially to voiceless minorities, but I don’t want us (humanity) to denature ourselves (each other) rather than grow ourselves. Social coercion is the water we learn to be ourselves in; it is the complex environment that coaxes out of us our own nuances.

While I’m dwelling on this topic I just have to say that one of the most basic and virulent forms of social coercion is the misuse of the word “we.” We is a powerful word. It can refer to the existence of the collective, the community of connection, that always exists, or it can be used as the worst form of inclusiveness that paradoxically excludes differences. “We” has been a generalization that has led to genocide, slavery and many forms of extreme prejudice. It behooves us all to pay attention to how the word is used by each of us. It is an indicator of what kind of bubble any of us lives in.

I think it better not to think so much in terms of social coercion, but to think more in terms of social diversity.

Seeing and Being Seen

There is an antidote to the plague of separation that seems to assail everyone in western industrial culture. Isolation is optional, not so much a product of having the invisibility cloak (see an earlier Slow Lane) thrown over one, as much as a choice to be seen. Visibility, and social isolation, are aided and abetted by decisions we ourselves make, by developmental conditions we foster, as we assume or avoid responsibility for ourselves. Isolation is as much self-imposed as it is a product of the culture we live in. Nobody is really a victim of a society caught-up in individualism. Responsibility for separation, for social isolation, for depressive ennui, is personal: resting upon how well one sees and allows themselves to be seen. Here’s what I mean.

If it is true that community conveys a personal sense of connection, which I think it does, then being known, which is how a personal sense of connection evolves, is a matter of being seen, and I would stipulate, of seeing. The bonding that is the hallmark of communal intimacy is composed of the same ingredients in a lower intensity, than those that determine social isolation and separation. By this I mean, that seeing and being seen are two of the common ingredients that determine how well we are known. So what? Why does that matter? It doesn’t, unless we want to evolve socially. The future of our kind might depend upon an increasing ability to see and be seen.

Seeing is in part a product of personal development. It is more than simply not being caught in the social trance that puts blinders on most of us. Being seen is a personal responsibility. It is more than a product of other’s blindness; it is a willingness to be transparent. Both of them take development, time to ripen, and enormous responsibility for self and other. They are the by-product benefits of community and solitude.

Seeing evolves. Every step along the arc of development involves beholding a larger, more complex and more complete picture. It literally takes a while for the eyes to adjust. What happens is that the eyes adjust to a more nuanced world and who we are, gets to be discovered as more nuanced too. Others become more vivid. Seeing becomes, the world changes, and what one may not want to see grows visible. Life gets livelier, wilder and more mysterious. Uncertainty flowers.

This all happens whether one likes it or not, and it all asks each of us if we are going to be part of the world we see? Or, if we are going to shut our eyes and imagine we are in another world that we believe we can handle? The choice is ours. But the implications go far beyond us. That is the hell, the communal responsibility, which often makes us chose blindness, and contributes to an ethos of not seeing and separation. Seeing stops when each of us chooses how much we are willing to see.

My family and I used to have a joke, we were seasick because we saw too much. The joke, of course was on us, because our actual sickness, how separated we felt, was our unwillingness to see what lay before and within us. So much was left unseen, including whole aspects of ourselves, and each other.

This is a good place to segue into the responsibility each of us has for being seen. It’s evident now that being seen has an inner component as well as an external one. If we are refusing to see in some way, then we are unlikely to see ourselves very accurately, and unable to make ourselves accurately known. Our chosen blindness contributes to the  social blindness around us, and insures the invisibility of lots of the world. It also disables us

Freedom, the chance to be oneself, the greater chance to discover one’s true nature, to know how connected one is, to even know something of that “larger something” one is connected with, and defined by, rests completely in the frightening capacity to make oneself seen. When one lets go of holding oneself hostage, then one arrives fully in the world, becoming visible. Such availability exposes one to the myopia of others. Being available to be seen can be painful and disappointing, but these are the conditions that make being seen possible. Freedom to be oneself comes with the sometimes painful responsibility of being scrutinized. 

Being seen is a choice. It is a form of exposure that populates the world with diversity and insures that real connection can take place. Community, which provides the prospect of truly being known, thrives on this kind of self-exposure. This choice isn’t the standard cultural activity, it is a preciously rare form of social activism. Choosing to be seen, standing out, is a courageous choice, especially when one actually sees the complexity of this world. Community is an antidote, a balm in an avalanche of  separation, but one that can only offer being known, to the degree of seeing and being seen, that is being practiced.

Admiration

A few weeks ago I was sitting in a circle contemplating an upcoming meeting with some young people. An elder in the circle commented that our job as elders had to include admiring the young. In addition to helping me better prepare for meeting this young couple, these words, started me thinking.  My thoughts have, as they always do, run toward community. It occurred to me that everyone needs to be admired, and that admiration could be one of the greatest gifts we can give to each other. These thoughts unlocked a door for me, and they are taking me into a new relationship with myself, and others. I hope, with these words, to share a little of that with you.

Not long ago I had an experience I didn’t know how to talk about. I found myself in a room full of dying people. These people didn’t have obvious illnesses, or even much real-time awareness of dying, but they all were on the same trajectory towards death. I was vividly aware that each was a dying human, that each was passing very quickly, and that I couldn’t do much about it. I felt vulnerable, helpless and strangely touched. As long as that moment lasted I could feel my love and appreciation for the uniqueness of each of them. I knew how grateful I was to be exposed to them.

The vividness with which I experienced the impending deaths of my friends has brought each of their qualities into my awareness. Noticing how quickly we are all passing has delivered me to a realization of how precious and unique each of us is. I more directly experienced the passion and heartache that underlies each life, and I could appreciate the personal, heroic struggle of each, as they chose to be human in their own way. I could feel how enriched my life is because each of them touched me, on their way into the mysterious darkness of death. I found myself smitten by the magnitude of our humble lives, awed and grateful, enlivened and trembling.

I couldn’t talk about the vividness of this experience, because it left me too raw, and too uncertain about speaking to the dying about dying. I still feel shaken about entering the land of the dying. I am noticing, while I am here, that I appreciate more the efforts that many are making to be as alive as possible as they pass from this earth. I am drawn to those who have been beaten, and are still magnificent, they give their life-energy fully, and they hearten me. I am filled with real, not manufactured, admiration.

I have been dwelling with this new, death-aided, admiration, since I have been initiated into the world of the dying. Paradoxically, I feel more alive, connected, and appreciative. I don’t take my friends for granted any more; they have become miracles I am blessed to be around. Each of them reveals to me something of the courage that being human requires. Each of them reminds me of how much profusion and diversity is in Creation.

Along with a more vivid relationship with the actuality of death has come a greater admiration for the living. And, this has lead to a greater desire on my part to let my fellow community members know how precious they are to me, and how well I see them. It seems to me, that perhaps the greatest gift I can give to another human being is to show them how well they are seen and appreciated. Community bonds grow with such acknowledgement

I have wondered how I might best serve my community. Now, I think I know. If I can fully live in the land of the dying, I can feel the courage and passion that goes into living out the part of Creation that is an expression of our vulnerable existence. I benefit by knowing the truth of this life: that it ends, and I get to see the utterly human way most of us deal with that truth. Some people, notably the people in my elder community, engage me and introduce me to a form of authenticity that gives me hope for life. I admire that, and I want to be around them, as we struggle to be true to the nature that endowed us with this precious chance.

I know I have wanted to be seen my entire life. The loneliness I feel so deep in my body is a product of that longing. There is no such thing as coming home, for me, without some sense of being known. This is the kind of sustaining food that I crave — being known, not as a therapist, community-builder, lover of art, music, poetry, men and women, but as a holy mystery, a part of the greater whole that lives through us. I crave the puppy pile of sharing recognition of this deeply mysterious existence. Admiring others, knowing them as they pass through, and bravely try to shape this existence, is such a gift, one that goes both ways, one that makes Life all that much more a miracle.

I’m glad I get to share it with you. And, I admire how you have done it. 

Gratitude for Darkness

“Darkness is the light most feared.”

The Solstice season is upon us. This is the time when one traditionally celebrates the return of the light. Each year we live through the darkest part of the year and focus most of our joy and gratitude upon the celestial turning that returns to us beginnings and new light. This is the season of the Christmas story, Kwanzaa, Hannukah, and the New Year. We, collectively, celebrate and honor the light that shows up in the darkest hour.

This year, perhaps perversely, I find myself thinking about my gratitude for darkness. I am well aware that what I am — some strange and contradictory combination of brokenness and wholeness — is a product, not of light, but, of darkness. I wheel around aware that I had to be dragged into hellish darkness to be forged into a new man — a lesser and paradoxically more capable being. It turns out that the Abyss is part of my parentage.

I used to think of myself as a kind of diplomat, an emissary from the realm of the needy. I was one who never hesitated to say that asking for help was one of the most community building things one could do. I was skewed enough to contradict the Bible and say that it actually is more blessed to need (to ask and receive) than to give. Now, however, I’ve come to see that I am really the ambassador of darkness. I came out of a place so dark that I never want to go back there, but all of my gifts of awareness were given to me there, and I have come to believe it is the darkness that gives Life.

I don’t have a Christmas tree, colored lights, or even candles, but I do have three wise men. They are all that remains of a once mainstream Christian life. They have stuck with me, and accompanied me during my lonely, sometimes solitudinal, dark vigils. I’ve come to see them differently, not just as heroes that persevered through the desert following a star, but as actual kings of the darkness, who have shown-up to pay homage to what the darkness has wrought. The star of Bethlehem is to me a product of the dark mystery surrounding it.

When I first had my stroke, and had to wait for declining year after declining year to find out if I would live, I used to curse the darkness of Creation. I was confused by the painfulness uncertainty of my life. I didn’t know then what I do now. I was being re-worked, re-made. In an invisible studio I was fitted with an awareness that could only come from suffering and helplessness. The hands that held and re-shaped me were not only invisible and non-palpable, they were stained with darkness, so deep and merciful that I could not imagine it.

Today, I have the pleasure of knowing many elders, old people who have known dark times – the sometimes painful, uncertain, and seemingly unending periods (where there is no human solace deep enough to last) — create compassionate understanding and real character. The darkness of Life, if it doesn’t kill one, confers a depth of humanity that cannot be attained any other way. In fact, darkness is the birthplace of depth. Hidden in the shadows is a dark gem, not one anyone can grasp, but one that sometimes grasps us. The broken body, job, relationship, or lifestyle, is a terrible well-spring that unleashes hard-won wisdom into the world.

I don’t really know how to be thankful for such a demanding and seemingly arbitrary fruitfulness. I feel hugely ambivalent about even harboring this awareness. I know I have much to give thanks for, that some angel must have had to endure a lot to give me a chance to write these words, but I would not wish this experience upon anyone. The darkness is just too exacting.

Still, here in the traumatized aftermath, I am thankful! I don’t really know how to express it, I don’t know how to honestly honor the unimaginable, but I know I owe this part of what is good about my life, to that which perched and feed upon me long enough that I became a being capable of being grateful for darkness. To me, this is the real gift of the season, one that in this dark-age offers a great deal.

In the end, I guess I write these words to remember what darkness has granted me, and to remind everyone that light sometimes shows up as darkness.

Trust

Trust. Trust is something that seems so undermined, that I no longer feel that we, as a species, would trust any human-made solution to our current environmental/economic crisis. It seems, that people no longer believe in people. And I guess there is good reason for this. Never-the-less, this development concerns me, it leaves me wondering about our social nature. The other, who is all of us, seems to threaten us. The other, each of us, seems to be a big bogey-man, an obstacle to peace, stability, and progress. Trust is low and very conditional. I am suffering because I am assumed to be a threat, before I even get a chance to interact. I am deemed untrust-worthy until I prove myself trust-worthy.

Maybe this is the way things are supposed to be. Maybe access to the commons is supposed to be contingent upon the right kind of behavior. I feel troubled by the level of distrust that seems to prevail everywhere however. I’m not talking about the kind of trust involved in leaving the door to your house, or car, unlocked. I’m talking about the kind of trust that is involved in leaving one’s heart and mind unlocked, the kind of trust that means engaging openly with an other.

I’ve been a psychotherapist long enough to know that this kind of trust is an inside job. The glib way to say it is that we trust others exactly a much as we trust ourselves. This seems to be one of the biggest problems that faces us. How can I trust another if I can’t trust me? Hold on, don’t be your self yet, because I’m not sure I can handle it. Hold on, I’m not even sure I can handle me being me yet. Until I am sure about me being me, I’m not really able to handle you being you. And if I’m just faking it, to reassure myself I’m trust-worthy, then everyone is suspect, because they might upset my delicate balance.

Unfortunately, even trusting your self is inadequate. The other is simply a shadowy projection of the self, not truly an other with mysterious, uncertain origins. Now reality is just too psychological. Self-trust is necessary, but only a step in the right direction. This is, admittedly, a step that is rarely taken. It represents a developmental achievement, which does ease distrust, but it doesn’t actually let the wild other run free. The other is satisfyingly us, a kind of unity gets to be in the world, but only at the price of diversity. The other isn’t perceived as having a reality of its own.

I’m not really too good at being someone’s projection. Actually, I resent it. I don’t want to be that tame. Instead, I want to be met. to have my authentic aliveness interact with another’s, to be a wild and uncertain beings meeting.  Each interaction, I would hope, has a flavor of first contact — me, alien, you, just as alien. Now what?

But what is trust then? Certainly it isn’t something I want to place in something or someone else. That is a risk. Keeping it to myself is an option, I know me well enough to at least be predictable. But, wait a minute! I also know myself well enough to know I have limitations, I may not perceive all the possible threats. I’m not totally trust-worthy. Trusting me is a better bet, for sure, than trusting another, but not a sure one. Is there a sure one?

I don’t think there is. Reality is a wild crapshoot. Yuck, and of course! I place my trust in the best illusion I can find, and only then, because it reassures me, not because it renders me any more secure. Strangely, and paradoxically, when I get this vulnerable, when I realize this is the way life is, that everything and everyone that exists is equally uncertain and vulnerable in this way: I become more trust-worthy, and more trusting. The untrust-worthiness of life generates greater trust.

This is the trust I want to bring to life. The trust-worthiness of knowing of how untrust-worthy life can be. The other doesn’t exist in any way for my sake. I don’t exist in any way for their sake. We share the vulnerability that comes with existence, and we can’t do anything about it.

I trust how untrust-worthy life is. That makes the other something I have no way of relating to. That makes of me an innocent, an empty-pocketed traveler, in a mysterious world, encountering the other like I would an ocean, a mountain, a herd of elk, or any other phenomena of nature. I am trust-worthy because I no longer carry a need for trust.

This is the kind of trust that can make relations more trust-worthy, but is it the kind of trust I am willing to put my faith in?

Goo

A few days ago a friend described to me a metaphor for metamorphosis that set me to thinking. He was watching a video of Barbara Marx Hubbard when she described the transformation, in the chrysalis, from caterpillar to butterfly. We had each heard the details of this change before. He found himself wondering about the soup of former caterpillar that was to become a butterfly. I too wondered about the soup, the gooey soup of butterfly potential. My wondering goes beyond the resistance to change that the final caterpillar cells manifest, to the properties of the transforming goo.  That wondering follows, and takes form, uncertainly, just as the cells of the new emerge from soup of the old.

There is something, somewhere, that knows what it is doing. The goo goes from no form, the broken-down mess of a caterpillar, to a newer more functional being, a butterfly. No one seems to know how. The goo seems to be part of a mystery that beguiles and threatens us. Efforts to aid, or try to speed-up, the emergence of the butterfly, only end-up with deformed, or dead, butterflies. So we know the process of this transformation is beyond us.

Or is it? So much of this mystery has been investigated. The goo has been looked at chemically and genetically. Currently, we tend to see the properties of this substance as the agent of transformation. The goo seems to contain the magic. But, I’ve been wondering if it isn’t just the goo, but something else, something the goo belongs to, and expresses, that may be the power behind this alchemical miracle.

I tend towards thinking there is “something larger” afoot. I don’t mean God, but something more mysterious and less defined than human notions of God. For lack of better words I call it Life. In this scenario, Life surges through the chrysalis, organizing the butterfly, to give expression to itself. It is only right that our attention is riveted to the chrysalis, to the miracle of transformation that takes place within. That shift of forms is so compelling.

A funny thing happened on the way to existence. Nature endowed us with all of its powers. This includes the power to transform like we see done in the chrysalis. Humanity has a track record of transformation. We call it evolution. Somehow we have been mesmerized into forgetting what we already know, that is, how to transform ourselves, how to evolve. What takes place in the chrysalis, takes place in our lives; but, instead of noticing these changes within, we get caught up in believing its only happening out there.

The potential to change lies within us. This is the good and bad news; good because transformation gives us hope, bad because it contributes to our sense of failed responsibility and deficiency. We have forgotten how connected we are, and with that connection, how the potential for change is also all around us. The hope is real. Change is happening. If we want to influence the direction of that change then we best be at the process of trying to align the inside and outside potential.

This brings me back to the goo. I think it has a lot to teach us about how to align ourselves with the power of transformation. There is something about being reduced that seems to insure that something new emerges. Life often does that to us. When it does we often call it a tragedy, accident, failure, sickness, or happenstance. If one is lucky then a new more sensitive and aware being emerges from the fire of that hardship. But we seldom invite that kind of change. We think of it as traumatic.

Isn’t there a trauma free variety of change? Yes, and no. The amount of trauma goes down as one learns to lean into the fire of transformation, but because it isn’t something one alone can accomplish, the outcome is unpredictable and often wildly unexpected. Trauma then correlates with expectation.

What I am interested in, is embodying the attributes of the goo. I’d like to learn how to live with less definition than I am used to, tolerating uncertainty, learning how to ‘not know’ well. I think I am becoming goo, as I get older, as I let go, and paradoxically, as I come to terms with my limitations. Maybe my death, the seemingly ultimate reduction of my being, makes me into goo.

I like to think so. I’ll trust creation to make something serviceable. In the meantime I think I’ll become the best goo I can be. Luckily, greying seems to be helping.