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.

Integrity

I feel careful about approaching this topic. I come to integrity because as I am getting older I find that it is growing more and more important to me. Therefore, I should be able to define it, but it is much more elusive to me too. Integrity seems like pornography to me. By that, I mean, a supreme court justice once said, when he felt compelled to try and define pornography, “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.” Integrity too, seems like something one can notice sooner than one can define it.  I’m not going to write so much about what it is, because honestly I’m not sure I know, but I am going to try to write about the benefit of its presence.

I notice who touches me. They tend to have it. When it is missing, and/or underdeveloped, I tend to take everything that person says, even if I like it, and agree, with a grain of salt. It’s not quite that I don’t trust them. Even meaning well, I’m not going to rely on them. Integrity is, for me, some kind of navigational device. It’s a funny one. I don’t have a sense, and can only rely on its presence, when I’ve developed it inside myself. My ability to recognize it, in others, depends upon the work I do inside myself to grow and develop it.

I’m not defining what it is, partly out of reverence for it. Integrity, seems to me, to be somewhat mysterious. I can feel it, it is like a kind of presence, a core of some kind, a reassuring solidity, which tells me somebody is home. I like knowing that spending time here, with this person, is going to be a good investment of my precious life-energy.

I also like knowing that even when I lose my balance, which is fairly often, I have enough ballast inside, to keep me from permanently being unbalanced. My integrity saves me from damaging falls, and helps me orient towards the future. This is a great utility, but a hard-earned one. It is important, noticeable, in its presence or absence, it is  essential to aspirations of real achievement, and largely untalked about. Integrity, I guess because it is hard to define, and is so mysterious, doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

No matter how true that last assertion is, integrity is growing like a good cancer, in my aging internal landscape. Life seems to want me to have integrity.  As I age, I’ve grown more aware of my approaching death, and of a desire to live really fully now. Integrity seems to have more to do with the latter. Somehow, the quality and value of my life seems to revolve around whether I am living truly or not. Integrity has to do with me having everything lined up. Its not enough that I have values (like it used to be), now I have to be living them out.

I guess the aging piece is important here.  Somehow, as I’ve grown older, it has become increasingly important to me, to look at my own life, and to bring things into alignment. Values are becoming actions. Relationships are becoming other limbs. Life is becoming miraculous on a more and more detailed level. There is a sense of continuity that calls for a more refined sense of alignment, if you will, integrity.

I had to begin learning about living with some kind of integrity long before I could actually do it. That has been hard. It still is. Refining what I’ve learned about myself, about the incredible difficulty of being human, about the possibility of compassion, keeps me ever vigilant, awake to the whole dance, adjusting to the rhythms of change. My sense of integrity always seems to be suffering from a kind of jet-lag, behind the moment’s need, but there enough to know and be grateful for the lesson of the moment.

Developing something that keeps me in the game hasn’t come easy. The difficulty is like initiatory ordeals. I have scars to show for it, but those scars serve to remind me, that my presence in the game isn’t an accident. I have worked hard to be capable of failing so thoroughly, and being able to learn so well from these miserable but gallant attempts. Gaining ballast is increasingly important to me now. Integrity, no matter how it is defined, allows me to persist, to keep going, and to keep myself oriented toward the mysterious source of being.

I want to die, and believe myself capable of going toward the light. I think I would be too afraid of the light, of encountering the truth of my being, if I haven’t placed enough emphasis upon living integrously. Integrity, that mysterious navigational tool, is my hope of becoming fully what I am capable of being. It hurts trying to live up to it, and it hurts even more living without it.

Integrity baffles me, just as it releases me. I am more of what Life intended me to be, because I am so caught up in trying to live fully. Integrity is a gift that requires constant play.

Play

“One of the results of having lived a regime of regularly scheduled days for almost our entire life is that we can easily lose the spirit of play. Not only do our bodys age, but our spirits can mildew a bit, too. Whether we know it or not, Life has lost some of its possibility of abandon, over the years. More importantly, the sense of play, the quality in us, that really keeps us young, after years of having been largely ignored, has been sapped of its electric edge. It may take awhile to retrieve it. But retrieve it we must if we are to let age have free rein in us.

Age is for the revival of the spirit. Age is meant to allow us to play — with ideas, with projects, with friends, with life.”— Joan Chittister from The Gift of Years.

There is a possibility that resides in old age, like never before. Play. The innocence and wonder of childhood flares up again. Old eyes, hearts and spirits experience the world with the same kind of creative reverence and incandescent wonder that graces the very young.

In so doing, the old one’s experience aids Creation. Newness burns brighter, near the end, where an educated experienced light shines forth. Slowly elders, the reborn old, are coming to realize that life still surges in their blood, and that the magnificent miracle has not forsaken them.

Maybe this culture has, mistakenly, but Life hasn’t. Strangely, now at this seemingly broken hour, it calls out of us our true uniqueness, and guides us toward discovering our belonging. The elderly are seedpods, they hold something that cannot be gotten to without the heartbreak and surprise of life-experience. They aren’t the used up ones, instead they are the well-used ones. To release the wisdom, and creative energy of ripeness, inherent in the lives of the old, Nature has provided fun, laughter, comraderie and play.

Play equals fun, and fun equals creative engagement, and that enlivens everything it touches. In fact, there is a continuum that extends from Creation to human play. What is happening at the largest scale we can barely imagine, is also happening locally, when the attitude of play breaks out in someone’s laughing delight. Getting older brings this into perspective. What once belonged only in childhood, suddenly is a gift that graces even the doddering. Some fun takes a lifetime to unfold!

Play isn’t just fun, it is educative.  Creation dances with energy, so do we. Creation plays with form, so do we. Creation explores the non-obvious, ill informed, irrational missteps, so do we. All along we learn, so does the force that animates us. It could be that one of humanity’s highest art forms is play, a creative imaginative engagement with what is. The active edge of the expanding Universe might be right here, in the spirits of those living right now within the dilemmas of Creation, and playing their hearts out.

Play is kind of a secret, a secret that doesn’t comport with our puritanical heritage, so it has kind of a bad name. The idea of it is much worse than the experience. So it, like old folks, is kind of pushed into the shadows. They are immigrants, still looking for a way to be taken in, still looking for the kind of recognition that frees their gifts. They are finding each other, there in the shadows, and something unforeseen is emerging, a new more playful way of being grey.

This is a development that has Evolution buzzing. Like all truly good things, this development is full of paradox. The most frivolous and nonsensical of pursuits contain some of the most mysterious and binding meaning. What appears, and must be held, as an unproductive act, produces the unexpected. The old are suddenly fountains of youth. Creation doesn’t rest, it doesn’t even pause to celebrate its achievements, but from this moment in time, play and ageing are wonderful building blocks for a future worth having

Impact

There is a part of being human that I’ve always found difficult. I hope that it doesn’t have to always be this way, this hard, but it always has been, and I want to try and do something about it. I’m afraid though. This is one of those things that requires me to ask for help. If that isn’t difficult enough, I know to get at this, in a real way, I have to ask for help from you, the very people my blindness impacts the most.

I can’t help it. I’m only human. That is not only my overused excuse, but it happens to be true.  Addressing this issue is probably going to take all the compassion I can muster, and all you can muster too. Being human means I generate impacts (often hurtful) that I’m not aware of. I am clumsy and blind, and I don’t know know it as much as I need to. Because all of this is so, I need you, and I know you need me. I would like to believe we could deal with the impacts we necessarily have upon, and with, each other.

I am one of, what my friend Jim calls, the “not-sees.” I don’t see some things very well.  What happens is that I do a lot of damage — I’m like the proverbial bull in the china shop — because I’m looking somewhere else, or I’m just unable to see all of the consequences of my actions.

I’ve done a lot of therapy, hell, I’ve been a therapist for a long time. Amongst the many things I did in both those roles, has been operate by the belief that I (one) could stop bumping into, and hurting (and sometimes being hurt by), people. I have been wrong about that. This is another example, though pretty ordinary, of how blind I can be.

Lately, I’ve come to see that my blindness is part of being human. I can see, only partly at best. That awareness has made it easier for me to apologize, but does nothing to help me cause less harm. Now my hope rests upon the company I keep. I know I’m going to bump into them from time to time —I’m fond of saying community is a contact sport — but it seldom goes easily when I do. I’m not pretending I’m not blind —I’m not a climate change denier (claiming we humans have no effect on the world) — in fact, I’m too aware that I do, and it leaves me feeling a regret I have a hard time getting past.

So my basic self-image right now contains an awareness that I am perpetually hurtful to the one’s I say I love. Since I say I love community that poses a real challenge to me. I want to do more than just feel bad about it. So, I’ve come to asking for your help. I know if I could just forgive everyone I wouldn’t have to feel this way, but I don’t want to issue a blanket pardon, that doesn’t adequately address the harm in the world that I (and others) seem to be a part of.

I realize I can’t make all of the hurt go away. I know that pain is sometimes the way Mystery gets in, but it seems that there is more hurt in the world than necessary. I’d like to be part of that changing some.  And, I’m just foolish enough, or immature enough, to think that it can be different, for me, and for all of us. But, I’m currently at the place where I can’t imagine that hurting, the hurting I’m responsible for, being addressed without your help.

I keep thinking about a more active form of forgiveness, one that is more immediate, personal, and natural. My imagination though runs to climate change. Before us, within our experience, there is plenty of evidence of our (we humans) impact upon Earth. Alongside that impact, I want to place the impact we have upon one another. Just as the climate is changing in response to our actions, so is the world of social relations being shaped by our impact upon one another.

I know I can’t help impacting you. I know you can’t help impacting me. But, I don’t live in a world where that is just a random coincidence anymore. I live in a world where I am awash in connection. I know there is little that is actually random about it. Yet, I still live like my social impacts are merely farts in the wind. That no longer seems right.

I need your help to live otherwise. Let’s talk about it. Let’s interact like our contact, our incidental impacts upon each other, are really gifts, gifts that indicate how truly connected we are. I want to celebrate the new awareness that is coming to me later here in life, and I can’t do it without playmates, without others who will share with me the difficult process of dealing anew with my (our) blind ignorance.

I don’t like to know that I am (despite my best efforts) overbearing, controlling, and think too much of myself. I don’t react well to finding out either. But, I can do better. I imagine that if I wasn’t feeling so alone, and so prone, in my isolation, to all kinds of bad feelings, that maybe I could handle knowing more about myself. I also imagine that if I knew I was deeply connected and wanted here, then I could celebrate the little things, the places where we intersect (despite, and even sometimes because of my intransigence).

Connecting asks this of me. I don’t think, despite all my self-reliant alarms, that I can pull this off alone. This is one of those places where I can’t help saying (thank God my disability has forced me into this ability), I need your help.

Please help me! I (words that are taboo in our social reality) need your hand. And, I have reason to suspect, you need mine. Let’s make the most out of our impacts upon each other!

You’re Perfect The Way You Are

There is a brief snippet of a story that introduced me to the subject I want to reflect on here. I was sitting in my men’s group many years ago when one of the men recounted this portion of the story. It seems a Zen Master was addressing his students, and he said, “You are perfect as you are” and “you could use a little improvement.” Hearing that story kicked me into a level of self-reflection that continues to this day. I have evolved since that time and so has my take on this paradox. Today, in this writing I hope to find out more about this on-going evolution. Bear with me, because I want this exploration to be more than merely an exercise in narcissism, I am hoping to touch what is universal about the task of loving oneself.

When I first heard this story I realized I had spent most of my life being on the “you could use a little improvement” side of things. I was a growth junkie. I had devoted myself to rooting out all of the ways I have holding myself, or anyone, hostage to my lack of development. Always, I was a work in progress. I still am. This wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t affect everything around me. At first, I was just aware of how it was a way I maintained a kind of perpetually inadequate self-image. Now, I’ve come to see it is more pervasive than that.

The remedy then was to shift my focus from “needing improvement” to “perfection as you are.” This provided an essential antidote. I was a lot easier on my self and slowly even developed more self-compassion. I remembered the story and maintained a kind of perspective on my self. My attitude towards me changed some. I say some because I have come back around to this little piece of wisdom and found myself fed anew by it. It turns out my happiness, and how I regard and treat others, is effected by how I hold the paradox alluded to by this little story. Here’s what I mean.

Until now, I have been a one-sided man. I haven’t had much capacity to hold paradox. As a result, even though I could relate to how this little story reminded me of the necessity of balance, I didn’t really have the capacity for paradoxical awareness, the ability to hold both sides. I got better, but I also got more sophisticated, and developed another thing to work on. I now, could strive for a new level of realization, and think myself honorable, while perpetuating my feeling of inadequacy. I was still a work-in-progress, I told myself, who wasn’t a work-in-progress, and that is true, but that belief only deepened my self-delusion. I knew I contained imperfections, which made it hard for me to settle down, and believe I was perfect as I was.

Lately, I’ve had a greater opportunity to be happy. The benefits of aging are setting in. Things like, more self-possession, less emotional reactivity, more interest in others, and a greater sense of connection with all of Creation, have altered my life. I’m ripening into somebody I’ve always wanted to be, but I still keep myself, and others, on edge, because I don’t hold the whole paradox fully yet. Recently, I became aware again, of how easily I let go of being “perfect as [I] am.”

I realized that my happiness hinges upon my developing, but still insufficient, ability to be “perfect” and to need “a little improvement.” Not only that, but I realize that holding myself hostage to my way of being one-sided, not only meant I couldn’t be happy with myself, but I couldn’t be happy with anyone else either. I have been a therapist, family counselor, community-builder and spiritual being, and always I relied on my ability to sense what was wrong with a situation. I have been good, and have learned how to promote growth. But, because of my one-sidedness, I have also promoted inadequacy and reliance on growth.

Now, I am becoming more capable of something I could only dream of before. Instead of seeing everything in terms of either/or, I am much more capable of both/and awareness. Thanks to the reminder of my friend Xan, I know I haven’t developed this capacity through my own efforts, instead it has been grown through me, by Life. I am ripening into a more complex awareness, that lets me see that I (like everyone else) am like Creation. Creation is perfect like it is, and it has the remarkable capacity to extend its perfection into improving/evolving.

As a self-identified change agent, I’ve come to a deeper level of this realization, that there is a wholeness at play, and that my best efforts only assist what is already underway. The best move I can make is to stay out of the way, and to dance happily in celebration of what is happening. Under these conditions, my happiness turns into happiness with others. Wow! What a good feeling follows!