Showing Up and Letting Go by Lucky

"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 by Lucky

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.

Life is the Teacher — Lucky

“Cultivating an inner life is a radical act today. And it is not as simple as it once was. There was a time when there were not so many workshops, seminars, CD’s and books that directed inner growth. Even more than today, we were left to our own devices. It seems like we’ve made progress, it seems like we live in a world were inner life is readily supported. But, all too often, the easy availability of these options only perpetuates the illusion that the real difficulties of life are optional. Learning is obscured.

Life is the real teacher. Experience is the real purveyor of knowledge. True self-building, real spiritual and psychological development, comes from living in the cauldron. Life graces us with the limitations that can convince us, because they are so challenging, that we are truly living and part of a larger drama. The roles we play in that drama are seldom defined by us, but the way we play them is. Self-building is complicated by virtue of the fact that we don’t get to solely decide what roles we want to play. Life never abandons us, that is the good news, but Life looks after its own, and in the process asks things of us. That is the more complicated news.”  (from True Things an unpublished work of David “Lucky” Goff)

It is ironic to me that I’ve gotten reintroduced to what I already know. This, apparently, is part of the “complications.” I, as the author of Embracing Life, have had to be reintroduced to how much influence Life has, and to how much self-deception I harbor. I have put this perception, which came to me as Life worked me over, someplace where I couldn’t forget it, but nor could I remember it. I think it was just too hot to handle or, it was too far over my head.

I have felt relieved to know that the winds of evolution, personal and transpersonal, are at my back. But I haven’t been so pleased by what is being asked of me. I haven’t wanted to be the one who faces the misdirected attempts I, and others, have made, ostensibly, on behalf of growth and maturity. It would be enough, to just feel elated by the recognition that Life is providing me with — all the raw materials and experiences I need to grow an authentic and original self. I think I am so slow taking in this reality, because there is some part of the music I don’t want to face.

I guess I’ve grown attached to the idea that I’m the Captain of my own soul. I like thinking that if I just do the right practices, enough, I can reach some kind of enlightenment. I don’t think I’m alone in desiring this. It seems to be very human. Although, I am stunted and hurt by this belief, I want to believe that my very human effort is enough. Maybe, I’m still catholic enough to want to believe some other human is going to save me. I’ve looked to others for spiritual guidance, teaching, good therapy, and a sense that if I could just get it right, I could feel good about my self and this life. While these efforts have brought some short-term relief, they have also contributed to the depressing belief that I am somehow flawed, because relief doesn’t last. You’d think I would be glad to be free of that belief. I am, and I am not.

I am not, because facing the truth that Life is the Teacher, makes it possible for me to see that all the years I devoted to being a teacher, therapist and helping professional served more to maintain an appeasing kind of misdirected effort towards consciousness. I see now, that I mainly camaflouged anxiety, by providing a presumed path that reassured others. I provided a well meaning, but never-the-less misdirected guidance. I now can see that that same tendency prevails everywhere, and is widely in demand.

Life teaches us, not so much through helping professionals, but more through unexpected experiences. Teachers can concoct great exercises, spiritual guides can offer good practices, but none are able to customize a growth regime like Life.

Life is the Teacher, shaman and coach, that delivers in an idiosyncratic and thoroughly original way. I may want it to be my power, or in someone else’s hands, but Life does Life’s thing so thoroughly and well, that it really doesn’t matter what I want. Life has my back, even when I don’t, and think I do. Accepting this reality is harder than it looks. To honor this new truth, I have to accept that misdirection is part of how I am taught. Life is the most interesting and unruly teacher I’ve ever been exposed to. I am alive at Life’s discretion, and I am being provided with just the experiences that make me who I am.

Life teaches me, and I am slowly catching on. The view of my life, Life’s life, is changing.  We are collaborating to create something original that can serve. I am along for the ride, and although I’m ambivalent, I’m glad I can now see more fully the fruiting that is happening within me.