After reviewing my blog, a friend suggested that she enjoyed the content but was confused as to my method of inquiry. My response: that makes sense because I don’t know what my method of inquiry is — or at least, I do not have consciousness around my method. I followed that up by joking that the blog is entitled “Grasping At Meaning”, so perhaps my method is “grasping”.
As I write this, I find these last sentences ironic because my initial inclination is to lean towards a definition of inquiry centered around awareness. I try to approach life from a perspective of possibility — Heidegger (despite his questionable political history) describes the notion of a “clearing”, essentially that which we can visualize and “see” for ourselves, the expanse of my imagined possibilities. At a certain point, the foliage grows thick and we can’t see past this thicket. We are inhibited from certain actions by many constraining factors. I would argue that human thriving can be correlated with the size of this clearing. As I come to know and expand myself, my realm of possibilities expands as well, and my capacity to move towards what I authentically enjoy increases too.
Let me begin with a simple example: Recently I was out walking around Joshua tree and I wanted a picture of myself. Yet, I nearly convinced myself I didn’t really want or need one. Why? Because part of my thicket that I have gradually come to explore and ‘clear’ includes the coercive pressures of humility and a discomfort inconveniencing others. I feel a sense of vanity asking for a picture of myself. I feel embarrassment approaching a total stranger, particularly for something that feels so trivial. In the past, these aspects would have meant that I would have walked away from that moment – and I nearly did – without asking for what I really wanted. But because of my awareness of these constraining feelings, I was able to recognize the discomfort, feel into it, and then ultimately take the action that I desired: to ask this stranger to take a picture of me.
It reminds me of a Victor Frankl quote that “In between action and reaction, there is a space and in that space lies our freedom”. Creating this space takes awareness and attunement to the present moment; it requires us to have explored the dense edges of our clearing, to have plodded through the hemming hedges and trapping saplings, to have found paths through this foliage so that when an action takes place, we have the self-knowledge to choose a different path than what is typically our reaction dictated by the shape of our clearing.
In truth, this conversation is not as simple as simply knowing that a part of my clearing includes a fear of vanity. Or perhaps it is that simple. But how do we become aware of this? This is the challenge. Often the constraints of our clearing are barely known to us; the edges are tangled and murky and we do not see how we are held back.
I am reminded of the David Foster Wallace commencement speech in which he tells a short parable: two young fish are swimming along and an older fish approaches moving the other way. He greets them, saying “Morning boys, how’s the water?” In typical rote fashion, they reply “good” and keep swimming, and then a few moments later, one turns the other and asks, “What the hell is water?”
We are all enveloped in our own waters: the compilation of family dynamics, larger cultural inheritances, the temperament of our city, our region, our nation, and so much more. But usually, we are like the two young fish, we don’t know the forces that invisibly surround us, we cannot see the edges of our clearing, we are left controlled by the water but wondering “what the hell is water?”
By way of another personal example, in the past, I have felt a sense of discomfort and shyness around physical intimacy. I can tell this is still part of my border that I am working with as it felt uncomfortable to even state this from a personal perspective rather than distance it from myself. I wanted to write “one could feel a sense of discomfort….”. (Which presents an interesting side note: one means of exploring your clearing could lay in asking what do I not like to talk about with others? When do I lapse into talking generally versus staying within my own experience?).
But I digress — perhaps again as this is one of those areas for me, ahh. Anyways, there are any number of origins for such a discomfort around physical intimacy. In my case, being raised in an Irish Catholic family, I lived through a tacit, unspoken approach to sex that – to me – conveyed a similarly hidden sense of shame. In ways that I doubt many of my family members were aware, they lived and acted within the perimeter of this cultural inheritance. I never had a conversation around sex — other than an admonition from my father that objectifying women in terms of pornography or lewd conversation is wrong. I agree with those things, but where was the other side? That our bodies are an amazing source of connection and pleasure, that physical intimacy releases oxytocin which has a myriad of positive health effects, that being engaged in a physical act with someone can be beautiful and allow us to transcend our small sense of self. In the past, I felt frustration but at this time, I have no more anger, only compassion for the subtle ways that our experiences shape and constrain us.
It is not fun to be constrained. I think depression and anxiety often grow forth from these subtle rejections of self. I remained unintegrated for a long time in ways that led to really unhealthy patterns of physical intimacy. I did not really realize what was going on. My sense of shame – and the implicit sense that physical intimacy was not a good thing – made it hard for me to embrace the physical aspect of my being. Instead of delighting in the ability of our bodies to offer each other pleasure, I felt embarrassment about being turned on or aroused. My clearing left me compartmentalized, shying away from any sustained physical relationship, instead opting for one-night encounters where in the cover of night, my unintegrated carnal desire (we are animals!) could avoid the spotlight of shame. But then, when morning came, when the moment to say hello and greet this person arrived, the part of me that desperately sought to not have physical urges caused me to shrink away, almost as if to pretend that the evening never transpired. I ran back within the clearing that I knew. But I did not realize any of this — I just felt the discomfort and acted from my clearing, avoiding actions that forced me to encounter my desire for physicality. Even now, I feel the discomfort: the many questions that emerge about how I will be viewed after saying all this, the fear that I said too much, the worry of how my family will react.
But even as I feel the warm patter of anxiety in my chest, I know that this is important and i should continue. My edges are most constraining when they are unexamined. When I am unaware of the water’s tides, it controls me much more — if I don’t see the movement of the water, I cannot choose to swim in a direction counter to its flow.
I won’t claim to know my clearing inside and out. This is a life-long process. In some ways, one could think of it as climbing a mountain. Amidst the switchbacks and lookouts, you often find yourself looking out over familiar terrain but from a new perspective. And, there are always surprise sights. Even this past week, I recognized a new pattern that I was acting out.
But to bring this back around to the initial thrust, if I were to develop a method of inquiry for this blog, it would center around the question of the clearing, and the steps we can take to expand what feels possible to us. Can I come to know and recognize my shame and insecurity around physical intimacy so as to move through these branches towards a new, more integrated way of being in relationship with another? It’s still uncomfortable to write this sentence, but several years ago, I could not even imagine writing that sentence. I did not even know it was a sentence to be written.
Thus I hope – in my writings and my graspings heh – to inquire about how and if these reflections are expanding my possible ways of being in the world. Is this a method of inquiry? I am not quite sure. How would I measure it? Perhaps in what I see as possible for myself — do I feel capable of acting in more or less ways now?
As an aside, I think this is one of my draws toward play — at it’s most fundamental level, play offers an opportunity to try on different ways of being, to be curious about ourselves and the various ways in which we can experience and interact with life.
And I wonder if this expansion of possibilities is not just external, not just the actions that I can take, but also the internal. Am I capable of feeling in new depths? Can I tap into different emotions and even relate these emotional waves in new ways?
Perhaps, this might extend the metaphor beyond the size and shape of the clearing, to my relation to it — how do I view the clearing? Am I frustrated by what I find in it? Or can I bring curiosity and acceptance? Maybe it is not just the actions that I can take (though I think this would shift with a new relation to my clearing) but also how I feel towards myself. It seems that being at peace with the idiosyncrasies of our clearing would be important to our ultimately health.
What do you all think? Do you know some of the boundaries of your clearing? How familiar are you with its’ shape and how do you feel towards what you are aware of?
As a few practical suggestions to apply this method of inquiry to your own lives and existences:
- Ask yourself, what would be difficult for me to write about publicly? Most likely, this is a source of some shame or insecurity, and is probably having a constraining effect on your clearing.
- Investigate the cultural values of your family/background. For me, as an Irish Catholic, many of the attitudes of Irish Catholicism wove their way into my imaginable possibilities. What are the values that may be shaping your water?
- Art Activity taken from a recent play group: draw out an image/object that represents you and fill it with words describing your best or “lightest” qualities, and then draw your “shadow”, writing there the habits or patterns about yourself that you don’t like, or try to avoid acknowledging?