To some it may seem that we are simply cast about like so much cosmic flotsam and jetsam – and on a day when the partner of the moment is dark chaos that is surely the experience. But partners change and the dance moves on – light creative order enters our experience. How wonderful it might be to hold that moment for ever. . .
The ecstacy is not in the moment,
But in its passage.
To hold the moment is to destroy it –
The ending of the dance.
I think we are all dancers who live fully when we dance. There is no abstract right, wrong or perfect way to dance, for each dance is perfectly what it is. It is not about “shoulds,” “musts,” or “oughts,” but only the dance in this, and every, present moment. We are called to the dance and in the dance we experience ourselves as a loving whole – at one with ourselves and all that surrounds us.
Last week I was working with an interesting group of 60 Aboriginal folks who work within the Canadian Forces and the department of National Defense, providing advice and support on Aboriginal issues within the military and civilian systems. We ran two half days in Open Space to work on emerging issues and action plans.
In an interesting side conversation, I spoke with a career soldier about fear. This man, one of the support staff for the gathering, had worked for a couple of decades as a corporal, mostly working as a mechanic on trucks. We got into an interesting conversation about fear. He said to me that he could never do what I do, walking into a circle and speaking to a large group of people. I expressed some surprise at this – after all I was talking to a trained soldier. I asked him if he had ever been in combat and experienced fear. He replied that he had been on a peacekeeping mission in Israel and that at one point in a threatening situtaion he had pointed a loaded gun at someone and awaited the order to fire, but he didn’t feel any fear at all.
We decided that it was first of all all about the stories you tell yourselves and second of all about training and practice. The fear of public speaking – fear that would paralyse even a soldier – is a fear that is borne from a history of equating public speaking with a performance. In school for example we are taught that public speaking is something to be judged rather than a skill to be learned. Imagine if we gave grades for tying a shoelace, or using a toilet or eating food. If we performed these important but mundane tasks with the expectation of reward or punishment, conditional on someone else’s judgement about them, having nothing to do with the final result, we might well develop fear and aversion to these things too.
The fact is that the fear of public speaking – glossophobia – is widespread and this makes me think it has something to do with public schooling. Our training leaves us in a place of competence or fear, and, as much of the training in social skills is undertaken implicitly in school (including deference to authority, conditional self-esteem and a proclivity to answers and judgement rather than question and curiosity) we absorb school’s teaching about these things without knowing where they came from. Certainly when I grew up – and I was a little younger than this soldier I was speaking with – speaking in school was generally either a gradable part of reporting on an assignment or was competitive, as in debating, a practice that was prevalent in my academic high school that sent many young people into competitive speaking careers as lawyers and business people. If you were no good at this form of speaking, the results of being judged on your attempts to get a point across were often humiliating. You lost, or you skulked away with the knowledge that people thought you sucked.
In contrast, my friend’s ability to find himself relatively fearless in an armed confrontation was a result of his military training, which, when it comes to combat, is all aimed having a soldier perform exactly as my friend had – calmly and coolly, especially in a peacekeeping role.
These days, in teaching people how to do facilitation, I am increasingly leaving the tools and techniques aside and instead building in practices of noticing and cultivating fearlessness. When you can walk into a circle fearlessly, you can effectively and magically open space. If you harbour fear about yourself or your abilities, it is hard to get the space open and enter into a trusting relationship with a group of people. Once you can do that, you can use any tool effectively, but the key capacity is not knowing the tool, it is knowing yourself.
How do you teach or learn fearlessness?
This is my son Finn, one of my teachers, facing huge waves at Ka’anapali on Maui last week. He plays in these waves with no fear at all. Waves that are two or three times taller than he is simply wash over him. He knows what to do, how to dive under the wave, how to swim in and out of currents, how to watch and read the sea, and his fear becomes play. He taught himself to bodysurf.
Fear does funny things to us. It makes us change sizes, for example. When we are confronted with a situation that creates fear, we puff ourselves up to seem bigger than we are, or we shrink away to hide and not be noticed. We do this by boasting, by telling stories that makes us seem more competent, more brave, more experienced than we are, or by engaging in self-deprecating behaviour that lessens our accomplishments, lowers expectations, diminshes our offerings.
It can seem like a challenge sometimes to just be the size that you really are, but I think when we are that size, comfortable in our skin and fearless in the moment, we become completely authentic.
When we are hard on ourselves, or hard on others, isn’t it interesting how it is those small moments that define character? Most of the time we are fine, everything is alright, things are calm. Even in war, soldiers spend most of their time in tedious inactivity punctuated by bursts of frightening violence. Cities are not in a constant state of crime. Governments work perfectly fine most of the time. It is the small aberrations that we notice and these then colour everything.
When you become aware of how much fear you don’t have, how much violence ISN’T happening, how much struggle ISN’T going on, you can take on fear, violence and struggle in context without a story that your whole life is like that. It’s like becoming aware of how much space there is inside an atom or between stars.
Presence is fine. Presencing absence is awe inspiring. We are mostly made of space.
Thinking these days about home.
Last week I was in Prince George working with people who are establishing an Aboriginal school in that city. I went from there to working with coaches who support Jewish day schools in the United States and Canada. In both places I felt at home, among people who lived out of a deep worldview, an ancient language and culture and way of life that included spirituality (but not religion per se). In each case we began with prayers and teachings – from a Lhedli T’enneh Elder in Prince George and in Boston a dvar torah delivered but a lovely and thoughtful Jewish Elder.
Home in both places. I am a mix of peoples and ancestries, none of which includes Lheldi or Jewish although I grew up in a mixed Christian and Jewish neighbourhood in Toronto and came to my Ojibway ancestry when I was a teenager. I don’t live in Toronto anymore – haven’t for 20 years now – and I’m far from Ojibway culture, living out on the west coast. Yet for me, this dislocation from home means that I can find home anywhere.
And what does it mean to find home? As my friend Teresa said on Sunday, it means discovering people that hold part of your story. She was relating a story of returning to her grandmother’s hometown in Missouri for her grandmother’s funeral and discovering there people that held the story of Teresa’s family, of her mom and her grandparents who owned the local grocery store during the Depression and helped hold the community together. What a gift to go home and hear your stories, as if they had lay there for generations waiting to be told.
Finding home means hearing whispers of your story everywhere, it means diving into any situation and seeing your relations there (all my relations) and feeling hosted. Being at home means being aligned with what is natural, what is constant everywhere, whether it’s in people or landscapes or stories, and using that to rest so that you can experience what is unique and particular to any given situation.
And as my friend Tenneson also said this weekend, it means acceptance of where you are. You cannot be at home if your mind is filled with the aversion of the present moment or the present experience. Open to right here and right now is what makes home. Finding myself in these situations I recognize that I have a choice of how to be, and that home is in my mind and in the way I rest it in the present experience.
Skillfully done, this can mean that you can be a snail, a slow itinerant who carries its home on its back, ready to stop and set up at any given time. A transient who can live anywhere, open to what is, curious about the gifts of the moment (even the hardest moments) and at home in the world.