Inside Outside
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about my place in the world – who I am and am becoming, how and what I’d like to contribute. While my interests are broad, I’m drawn most deeply toward inner things – activities and writings and conversations that deal with inner growth, inner healing, inner change. Stuff of the soul.
What does this mean, I’ve wondered, for the ways I engage the world around me – a world that is shaped tremendously by inner landscapes (the brokenness and wholeness inside each of us), but that simultaneously demands engagement at an outer, public level? At least from one perspective, elections are decided, for example, or policies written, or organizations founded and run not by people sitting alone in front of therapists, or journals, or shrines, but by folks walking precincts, by suits behind desks, by time-consuming research, grant-writing, networking, speech-giving, and cooperation. The impact of the public sphere on all of us can’t be taken lightly (if for no other reason than that it pays our bills!).
In my attempts at finding my role in the world, I look around at how full of shadow the public sphere seems to be, and wonder sometimes whether public light is the only kind worth trying to shine. There is urgency, gripping and practical, in every public torch that people raise.
But something makes me pause in that conclusion.
Last year I returned from an anti-war protest just days before the invasion of Iraq. I was overwhelmed by the multitudes who marched in solidarity there (San Francisco), buoyed by the hope that public outcry can shape history, grateful for the time and genius and creativity that people around the globe pour into organizing events and associations that address important, life and death issues.
But I came home also struck, at a personal level, by how jarring the experience was for me, and how it wasn’t a natural expression of who I am and am seeking to be. Setting aside my introversion, and how much energy it takes for me to be that stimulated by sight and color and sound, I discovered that yelling my convictions, waving pithy signs, and laughing at parodies of politicians isn’t quite…me. It’s all part of the yin and yang of a public activity I believe in, but it isn’t quite consistent with the messages I personally feel called to sing.
I’m thinking these days that maybe the most important thing I can do for the world, the most needed and urgent thing, is to listen attentively to who I am, and then seek to live into that in ever fuller ways. This probably won’t mean politics, for me. Or joining many of the good causes I truly believe in, and that swirl around me daily, clawing for recruits. But my intuition says this kind of attentiveness, this living into myself, is somehow far more important for everyone involved. Everyone. The universe is an organism, I’m thinking, and as a soul or an eye or an ear of that organism, I don’t want to try to act like feet. And, likewise, I want to use my eye, or ear, or soul for the function it pulses to serve.
In one of the most difficult seasons of my life, a large yellow cat decided to spend time daily on my deck. He would usually be there by the time I sat down at my desk in the morning, and stay until lunchtime. And I swear, the catness of that cat was holy. The peace, the rest, the unanxious, unstriving, unconcerned-about-the-future aura of that animal oozed all over the place, into my house, and into my soul. My outlook on life, and consequently my interactions with myself and everyone else, were deeply affected by this animal just fully, unabashedly, unselfconsciously doing its thing.
I’m coming to think that my Kristin-ness and your yourness are every bit as holy, and every bit as world changing, and worth living into as the most noble, or heroic, or courageous role that any of us could dream up. Listening to and living into ourselves may in fact be more courageous than any other thing we could do.
September 21st, 2004 at 9:40 am
Kristin, you lovingly write: “This probably won’t mean politics, for me. Or joining many of the good causes I truly believe in, and that swirl around me daily, clawing for recruits. But my intuition says this kind of attentiveness, this living into myself, is somehow far more important for everyone involved.” And I think this is right, and marvelously easy–in the sense of living congruently with the self within…no masks, no attempts to be something other in order to “join up”. I also think this is extraodinarily difficult, in the sense that so many forces conspire against this kind of differentiation. But without this differentiation, we lose out on the sacredness of every single God-breathed self. The monastics understood this. They realized (paraphrasing something I once read in Thomas Merton), that so long as they floated along in the floatsom of society as they experienced it…so often full of powergrabbing, abusing, image-of-God-in-everyone-denying…they were powerless to do or be anything meaningful. Their monastic flight wasn’t a removal from the world so much as it was a search for some craggy outcrop on which to stand and see and be, and from that place of differentiation, of clarity, a holy place, to pull the whole world to safety after them.
I sense this in you. Because of this, you may always find yourself looking in “through the screen door” (as you once put it…your own “craggy outcrop”?) at others who may be less differentiated than you are, and you may long to be with them, fear you are missing out, or worry that you are just plain strange. But there may also come those times when you find yourself entering the room and from your studied place once outside, you are able to be there without losing your soul. And that may well be the best thing you can do for everyone including yourself.
September 21st, 2004 at 10:12 am
Thanks for this, Chris. The monastic search, the “screen door” effects of it, the hoped-for ability to enter rooms without losing self or soul: beautiful naming here. Thanks for this gift.