WE ARE ALL BORN TO STAND OUT, NOT TO FIT IN.
We sometimes think that the circumstances in our relationships keep our relationships from being great. (If only she fill in the blank, if only he fill in the blank, etc.) But it’s not the content that determines the quality and power of our relationships—it’s the way we hold the content, the conversations we engage in, the conversation we are, the stand we take for workability.
Power, fulfilment, satisfaction, and aliveness in our relationships happen if we take our various complaints, or things we think don’t work, and promise to produce what’s missing (not as an insufficiency, but a possibility for something). To promise to produce what’s missing leaves us at risk.
Being related is a grand conversation—it’s living in a possibility, and if it’s a possibility, it’s inherently risky. If it’s not risky, if it’s a sure thing, if it’s predictable, then what we’ll be left with is something trivial.
Our closest relationships then become a place of explanation rather than exploration, of resignation rather than declaration. In those moments, courage is required to set aside our judgments, characterizations, and opinions and create our relationship being powerful again—being related is a
conversation, and with that comes an infinite malleability. Love, genuinely and openly expressed, is enormously powerful. And it’s in risking ourselves, in revealing ourselves to one another and to those closest to us, that we become ourselves.
When relationships are driven by complaint or by keeping track of who did what, or the need to be right, to control, the wonderful world of human possibilities ceases to reverberate through them.* Possibilities between people require a space in which to create, and when that space isn’t there, most likely it’s because we’re holding on to something incomplete from the past. Completing things comes down to a matter of getting beyond the “yeah buts” and “how ’bouts” and the “but ifs,” past our old
assumptions about “the way things have been” and creating a context of our own choosing.
When we experience things as being complete, it’s a state change, from being a character in a story to being the space in which the stories occurs—to being the author, as it were. And because relationships exist in language (not just as a set of feelings or accumulation of experiences, for example), there’s a malleability, a plasticity, a can-be moved-around-ness about them. When we shift the locus of our dissatisfaction and complaints from something that exists “out there,” to something that’s located “in” what we are saying (language), what’s possible shifts.
Being satisfied is not a feeling later labelled with the word “satisfaction,” rather it is a commitment, a stand we’re taking for that possibility. It’s a transformation—a contextual shift from being organized around “getting satisfied” to an experience of “being satisfied”—that alters the very nature of
what’s possible.
For most of us, “I” is positional (“you” are there and “I” am here), a location in time and space, a point of view that accumulates all previous experiences and points of view. Does this “I” presume a substantial entity located inside our bodies, or is it located in our minds, our families, job titles,
Facebook profiles, bank accounts—those trappings that help us maintain the meanings and understandings that we have up ’til now considered ourselves to be?
How we “arrive” at this identity is mostly inadvertent. Essentially it is built from a series of decisions we made in response to what we felt or saw (consciously or not) as failures to do or be something. When these “apparent” failures arose, we made decisions about how to compensate for, respond to, and accommodate ourselves to them. The degree to which who we are today is filtered by those early decisions goes unrecognized.
Whether it is one or 10 or even 40 years later, we still hold on to that with which we’ve identified—obscuring access to ourselves and leaving us no powerful way to be with whatever is going on. But stepping outside of our identity isn’t so easy—it’s achieved a certain density throughout our lives, and it is all we know of ourselves.
The idea that another whole idea of self is available can be disconcerting, invalidating. In setting aside those things that gave us an “identity” we “become aware that this so-called self is as arbitrary as our name. It’s like standing over an abyss, recognizing that ‘I,’ as we know it is not an absolute.”* But it is here, with this recognition, where transformation occurs—where we can invent ourselves as we go along. This revealing of our selves to ourselves occurs in a profound way that can alter the very possibility of what it means to be human.
There was a forest at the beginning of fiction too. Its canopy of branches covered the land. Up in its living roof birds flitted through greenness and bright air, but down between the trunks of the many trees there were shadows, there was dark. When you walked this forest your feet made rustling sounds, but the noises you made were not the only noises, oh no. Twigs snapped; breezes brought snatches of what might be voices. Lumping's and crashes in the undergrowth marked the passages of heavy things far off, or suddenly nearby.
This was a populated wood. All wild creatures lived here, dangerous or benign according to their natures. And all the other travellers you had heard of were in the wood too: kings and knights, youngest sons and third daughters, simpletons and outlaws; a small girl whose bright hood flickered between the pine trees like a scarlet beacon, and a wolf moving on a different vector to intercept her at the cottage. Each travelled separately, because it was the nature of the forest that you were alone in it. It was the place in which by definition you had no companions, and no resources except your own uncertain self.
When we’re young, things can get out of control pretty quickly. We experience danger as a distinct possibility that’s “out there somewhere,” and it becomes a notion that stays with us, at some level or another, throughout time. So from a very early age, we’re kind of
on alert. The idea that life can be dangerous doesn’t go away just because we become (more rational) adults. And when we carry around the idea that life could be dangerous for many years, even the notion of
possibility can seem, well…threatening.
When we give our fears rein, even the smallest moments can be daunting. Fears arise when we look back, and they arise when we look ahead. Fears arise about ourselves, and about our reception from others. Whatever their origins, they prevent us from living fully. Whether a threat is
real (a situation where our survival is at stake—our security, our health, keeping our families safe) or
imagined (a situation that
might await us, something that
might happen—or where we
might be made to look foolish, for example), it is all about survival. Those moments of fear and anxiety—with the constriction in our chest, the fluttering of our hearts, the feelings of imminent danger or potential embarrassment—can be overwhelming, because we think some aspect of our survival is at stake.
Perhaps even more than sadness, anger, or disappointment, we find it difficult to deal with fear. Fear can keep us from participating, from doing what we’re capable of—from experiencing and expressing the full range of possibility that’s available to us in being human. The disempowerment, constraints, and stops, however, are not a function of the
experience of fear but rather a function of the
meaning we’ve added, and the decisions we made, at a particular time in the past. Another way of saying it is that it’s not the fear that is operative, but the automatic way we collapse something has happened with what we say it signifies. It is that automatically that keeps us stuck in place, and what has us lose our individual power. Old circumstances now have the power and to us.
Perhaps even more than sadness, anger, or disappointment, we find it difficult to deal with fear. Fear can keep us from participating, from doing what we’re capable of—from experiencing and expressing the full range of possibility that’s available to us in being human. The disempowerment, constraints, and stops, however, are not a function of the
experience of fear but rather a function of the
meaning we’ve added, and the decisions we made, at a particular time in the past. Another way of saying it is that it’s not the fear that is operative, but the automatic way we collapse
something that happened with
what we say it signifies. It’s that automaticity that keeps us stuck in place, and what has us lose our power. Old circumstances now have the power, not us.
When we stop going for it—when we step back, play it safe, or say we can’t do something—we might avoid the experience of fear for the moment, but at the same time we are reinforcing where we’re stuck. We’re limiting our freedom, and cutting off possibility. Being alive includes risks, threats, and danger—the possibility of “bad” things happening is always there. But in planning our life to avoid those things, we’re essentially avoiding life—obviously not the wisest way to be alive. The
Harvard Business Review might not be where you’d expect to read about fear’s pervasive presence, but the following appeared in a recent issue and I thought it apropos: “I get the willies when I see closed doors.” That is the first line of Joseph Heller’s
Something Happened, one of the handful of superb novels about business. Heller’s hero and narrator, Bob Slocum, a middling executive at an unnamed company, is driven nearly mad thinking that decisions might be made behind his back that could ruin his career and his life, or might merely change things that are, while odious to him, at least bearable. Without transparency, Slocum is a quivering wreck. He’s not alone. As the second chapter begins, Slocum says, “In the office in which I work there are five people of whom I am afraid. Each of these five people is afraid of four people (excluding overlaps), for a total of twenty, and each of these twenty people is afraid of six people, making a total of one hundred and twenty people who are feared by at least one person.” The company, in other words, is a pyramid of potential panic, ready to topple when someone whispers, “Jig’s up.”
When we stop going for it—when we step back, play it safe, or say we can’t do something—we might avoid the experience of fear for the moment, but at the same time we are reinforcing where we’re stuck. We’re limiting our freedom, and cutting off possibility. Being alive includes risks, threats, and danger—the possibility of “bad” things happening is always there. But in planning our life to avoid those things, we’re essentially avoiding life—obviously not the wisest way to be alive. The
Harvard Business Review might not be where you’d expect to read about fear’s pervasive presence, but the following appeared in a recent issue and I thought it apropos: “I get the willies when I see closed doors.” That is the first line of Joseph Heller’s
Something Happened, one of the handful of superb novels about business. Heller’s hero and narrator, Bob Slocum, a middling executive at an unnamed company, is driven nearly mad thinking that decisions might be made behind his back that could ruin his career and his life, or might merely change things that are, while odious to him, at least bearable. Without transparency, Slocum is a quivering wreck. He’s not alone. As the second chapter begins, Slocum says, “In the office in which I work there are five people of whom I am afraid. Each of these five people is afraid of four people (excluding overlaps), for a total of twenty, and each of these twenty people is afraid of six people, making a total of one hundred and twenty people who are feared by at least one person.” The company, in other words, is a pyramid of potential panic, ready to topple when someone whispers, “Jig’s up.”
When we can separate out
what happened from
the meanings we assigned, we no longer have to be “at the effect” of whatever happened. We
don’t have to work on top of it, push it down, accommodate, or adapt to it. We survived the first time, the second, third, and so on—completing a past fear includes recognizing that we would
survive if the past repeated itself.
There’s a big difference between being realistic about what happened once, and being resigned or stuck that things
have to continue to be some way
now or that they just
are some way or
they’ll be that way again. Instead of wishing we could change our past experience—a futile exercise—we have the freedom to choose our relationship to whatever it was, and that’s the beginning of building power. That’s the beginning of creating possibility.
Possibility invites us into areas of creativity, of uncertainty, of paradox and surprise. It invites us to bring things into existence that haven’t existed, take a step one side or another, unsettle old realities. Our own identity, say, or the certainty of some fact, the behaviour of others, or even the meaning of words can come to be seen and understood in new ways.
It takes enormous courage to try out new
ways of being in the space where fear used to be, and by choosing to do so, we come to be authors of our own experience. Choosing requires courage—and courage leads to the ontological question of
being. Courage is rooted in the whole breadth of human
existence, and ultimately in the structure of
being itself.
Courage can show us what
being is, and
being can show us what courage is.
1 Francis Spufford,
The Child That Books Built, pp.
24-25
2 Thomas A. Stewart, “Seeing Things,”
Harvard Business Review,
February 2008, p. 10.
3 Paul Tillich,
The Courage To Be
*Adapted from Colin Wilson, The Mind Parasites, Oneiric Pr, 1990 (orig. pub. 1967)..
WE WERE BORN TO STAND OUT. NOT TO FIT IN by Sonia F Stevens
