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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504313230 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Balboa Press AU |
| Publication date: | 06/12/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 150 |
| File size: | 335 KB |
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CHAPTER 1
Awareness: Negative Space
I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.
— Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, Artist
I turned fifty. It's a milestone birthday, right? It's meant to mean something. Prior to this event, I was doing a fair amount of reflection on what I wanted it to mean for me to reach half a century. In so many ways, it's just an arbitrary number that has little significance. It's only the story you associate with the age of fifty that makes you feel something about your identity. Regardless of the number, I am the thing I choose to believe I am.
I was reading what other people said about turning fifty and came across a description of ageing as being similar to moving through a house with many rooms. The older you get, the more rooms there are that are shut away from you — rooms you will never need to go back into and rooms you can never go back into. I found it interesting that ageing was often described as what was no longer available to us — what was lost or diminishing. Whilst I can see that point of view, I experience something quite different too.
This got me thinking about how we look at situations and how we can lock into a view that life is either positive or negative. It's the endless duel of opposites. It's either this or that, right or wrong, happy or sad, or good or bad. I think our minds must default to this binary view of life. We are something, yet we are also not something. The perspective we take on this can make all the difference.
In coaching, I am often listening out for what is not being said along with what is being said. It's like when you are creating or looking at art; there is positive and negative space, and both give form to the image. The space around and between the subject can form an equally interesting and artistically relevant shape, so much so that the negative space can become the real subject of an image. The negative space has as much relevance as the positive, and together they cause the radiance of the whole form.
The information and descriptions that can matter most about us are sometimes the very ones we ignore. The opposite of what we sometimes focus upon is where the gold lies. Understanding our lives and ourselves can be the equivalent of looking at an x-ray.
When recently I examined an x-ray of my lungs, I noticed that my lungs, filled with invisible air, were this dark mass, yet my bones, these solid structures inside me, were luminous, ghostly, white forms. It was the reverse of what you imagine it should be.
Too often, I notice that people spend an inordinate amount of time suffering under the burden of what is not in their lives. Time after time in coaching sessions, people present stories of what they wish they had said or what could have been done. They struggle with what others haven't done for them, what was disregarded, and worse, what was devalued. These events they talk about resonate with a disharmony in their being, a conflict caused by what's not being fulfilled. I believe unmet desires are possibly more important than those we fulfil.
I know this to be true for myself too. For so long, I was overly concerned with my past and what it had done to me. I showed up in the world self-conscious of what I wasn't. What has become clearer to me the older I have become is that because of my life events — the losses and deprivations as well as the things I chose not to be, didn't know how to be, and would not follow — I have become something impressive. For far too long, I busied myself looking at what wasn't there, so I had little time or energy to see what was there.
The truly great artists, like Michelangelo, know how to use both positive and negative space. To find the angel in the marble, Michelangelo had to chip away what wasn't angelic. But the parts that were removed were equally important in allowing the form of the angel to emerge. So when I am coaching people, I am working with them to see the entire form — what is there, what has been removed from what was there, and what impressive form is seeking to be noticed within the negative space as well as the positive space. You can't fully value the angel Michelangelo carved unless you recognise what is also not part of the angel.
As we age, we change the way we see the world and ourselves in it. We see again what and who we are. Age opens us up to a more intricate view of ourselves. I'm still chipping away at the marble block, self-shaping my angelic form, but I cannot transform into an angel without noticing the things that are there and those that are not there. Age has moved me farther away from myself so that I can fully appreciate the artist who is creating my form.
We are all more impressive than we think we are because of everything we are and everything we are not.
* * *
Bring your attention to what you are most aware of when you think about who you are becoming:
* What are you enjoying about the process of getting older?
* How is your awareness of who you are shifting as you age?
* What parts of you or views about life are you releasing with age?
* How are you clearer about what you are no longer prepared to be?
* In what ways do you feel closer or farther away from the "inner angel" you are revealing to yourself and the world?
Belief: Suspending Your Disbelief
Most of us need to believe that we are good people following sound thinking processes and purposefully using our bodies and minds as we move through our lives planning, deciding, and acting with intentions that are good. We like to think we are making good choices because we are good people. It takes a particularly unique individual to approach life with an unadulterated belief that he or she is bad and must advance through life making poor decisions and consistently performing bad deeds.
However, on any given day, from our particular vantage points, we can look out at the world and see multiple examples of people making what we deem bad decisions and generally messing up our plans, our peace, and potentially our planet. Many of us might even see ourselves as the unfortunate people who are constantly mopping up, redirecting, and carrying out repairs because of all the poor thinking that has come before we stepped in to save the day.
If the majority of us are so prone to thinking we're good people, and we're doing the right things, why do we experience a world that seems littered with the consequences of poor choices?
The Enlightenment, which governed the European world of ideas in the mid-eighteenth century, resulted in a growing bias
towards science and empirical evidence. It moved men and women away from mystical beliefs like the divine right of kings into a more questioning and experimental consciousness. The essence of the Age of Enlightenment is often encapsulated in the phrase Sapere aude (Dare to know).
Our Western human psyche latched onto empiricism, and we moved into a life of practical proof points. Science fixed up the anomalies of life, and the bits that couldn't be explained by science weren't worth examining. Science reduced human beings down to machines, life became a process, and the patterns and behaviours of all animate objects could be aligned to formulas, frameworks, and fixed points of data. Hope and faith became redundant because science could light the way into a knowable and predicable future.
Any parent who is helping a child select subjects for the final years of school will feel the pull and power of the logical sciences over the arts. The weighting of the sciences is just greater. However, these scientific "facts" we revere are really just beliefs we have come to call truths.
Everything is a belief — including that statement! The playwright and Oscar-winning screenwriter Robert Oxton Bolton said, "A belief is not merely an idea that the mind possesses. It is an idea that possesses the mind." What we believe becomes an assumed truth. We move through life forming beliefs to anchor our sense of existence into an understanding about the way the world works. Once we have formed a belief, we like to persevere with that belief.
Our beliefs are inextricably entangled with language. If we have a word for something then it exists. We language our reality into existence. Once we have named something, we think we understand it and know the meaning it has in the world. What I cannot name seems unknowable. The truths about the world that I form come from what I can label. Even though we might call something true, there could in fact be over 7.5 billion interpretations of that truth — one to suit each of us rationally moving our way around the planet.
When we choose to believe one thing, we often end up disbelieving anything that contradicts our primary belief. We build for ourselves one belief system and multiple disbelief systems. When we are stuck or confused about our place in the world, it might not be only our beliefs that need revision but our disbeliefs too.
Those rational, good-choice-making brains of ours struggle to let new beliefs in because new ideas can cause seismic rumblings, and our cities of thoughts can't always withstand these quakes in their foundations. If we are bold enough, we can allow our minds to take a little wander into new territories, and enter through the gateway called curiosity, and fl oat our thinking into this wonderful space known as the suspension of disbelief.
The poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the term suspension of disbelief to describe the willingness we adopt to release our critical faculties momentarily and believe the unbelievable for the sake of enjoyment. When we allow ourselves this experience, our books can transport us to Middle Earth, actors can embody kings and queens, magicians can amaze us, and a two-dimensional piece of art can enchant us. We have this wonderful ability to think, and imagine, and even experience anything our heart desires or imagination can create — just for a moment.
Estelle Frankel, in her book, The Wisdom of Not Knowing, refers to the term premature foreclosure to describe the human trick we perform to arrive too quickly at our conclusions about ourselves and our experience of the world. Pessimists have a particular knack for this as they rapidly condemn themselves to lives of predicted catastrophe and emotional despair. Learned optimists or optimising realists tend to withhold judgement for a few more breaths, staying open to possibility and partaking in the grand mystery of life with a willingness to be utterly surprised and delighted. If we don't prematurely foreclose on what something has to be, we allow it to become the multiple options that are possible. There is an intelligence in not calling it too early.
In The Science Delusion, renegade biologist Rupert Sheldrake urges us to explore and debunk the major scientific assumptions we have inherited from our ancestors. Sheldrake stays curious about things like how our dogs know when we are coming home.
He introduces us to this nicely named scientific term, morphic resonance, to help us understand the mysterious and invisible processes of memory storage and biological inheritance.
Morphic resonance allows us to believe that our minds and bodies might be more like TV receivers rather than video recorders (to use a very mechanical metaphor). It is possible that we transmit and receive signals as a species from past members of the species and affect the inhabitants of the future through the signals we transmit. The power of this idea is that an individual's movement forwards in their consciousness means the whole human operating system gets a beneficial upgrade and reboot.
Simply put, our thoughts can shape the future of our lives and our children's lives. We can make the world a better place by thinking better thoughts. This might require us to let go of some beliefs and explore some of our previously held disbeliefs.
Delaying judgement about the worthiness or unworthiness of an event, a discovery, or a person might well be the necessary talent for the pioneers who will move our race forwards and save us from extinction.
Wouldn't it be powerful if the zeitgeist of the early twenty-first century could be "Dare to become the best version of you"? It's a dare because you need to be brave to trespass into territories that don't allow you to affirm your current belief system. Those who dogmatically claim they are right and know the truth are really trying to appease their anxiety about the unknowable future.
Instead of trying to assuage our fears of the unknown, maybe we should just suspend judgement for as long as we can tolerate, and then push ourselves for a moment longer to make sure we make room for what was previously deemed unbelievable.
* * *
Spend some time exploring your belief system that helps you make sense of the world and how you live the best life possible within it:
* What do you believe about the meaning of life? Is this a complex and large question to answer? Or is this question an invitation to share how you make sense of a deep and mysterious perspective you hold about life?
* How do you practice delayed foreclosure on events? How do you postpone judgement for as long as possible so events or people do not have to conform to what you already believe?
* Do you notice what belief systems others hold about life seem to bash up against your beliefs? Why do you think this happens?
* If you believe, even for a moment, that you are transmitting thoughts that can change the future for yourself and others, what thoughts are you least happy and happiest with transmitting?
* How might you use today or the weeks ahead to believe you are becoming the best version of you?
Courage: Scheherazade
Living is a creative act. Too often, I encounter people who are existing — making do with what life seems to throw their way, or somehow waiting for their real life to start. Consequently, they allow precious days to slip by adventureless and undifferentiated from the next.
There are a range of reasons for why this happens, and perhaps at times in our life it is necessary for us to move back from the growing point of creativity and reflect or lie fallow so that we are re-energised for the next inspired act in our lives. I believe that one of the reasons we lose sight of how living should be a creative act is fear. We are scared to stick our necks out because we have learned (or bought into a belief system) that risk is dangerous.
From your childhood, do you remember the stories of Scheherazade, who told the tales of the 1001 Arabian Nights?
The story goes that every day the king of Persia would marry a new virgin, and, after doing so, he would dispatch the previous day's wife to be beheaded. This was done in anger, having found out that his first wife was unfaithful to him. He had killed 1,000 such women by the time he was introduced to Scheherazade. Now Scheherazade was a wise and well-read woman who had within her many, many tales. Against her father's wishes, Scheherazade volunteered to spend one night with the king.
Once in the king's chambers, Scheherazade asked if she might bid one last farewell to her beloved sister, who had secretly been prepared to ask Scheherazade to tell a story during the long night. The king lay awake and listened with awe as Scheherazade told her first story. The night passed by, and Scheherazade stopped in the middle of the story. The king asked her to finish, but Scheherazade said there was no time, as dawn was breaking.
So, the king spared her life for one day to finish the story the next night. That following night, Scheherazade finished the story, and then began a second, even more exciting tale, which she again stopped halfway through at dawn. Again, the king spared her life for one more day to finish the second story. And so, the king kept Scheherazade alive day by day, as he eagerly anticipated the finishing of the previous night's story. At the end of 1,001 nights, and 1,000 stories, Scheherazade told the king that she had no more tales to tell him. During these 1,001 nights, the king had fallen in love with Scheherazade, and so he spared her life and made her his queen.
One of the tales Scheherazade tells her king is the one we now know as Aladdin. The original story of Aladdin is that he was a poor farmer, and, one day when ploughing his fields, his plough gets caught on something. He discovers a metal ring embedded in the ground that opens to a chamber filled with treasures. Aladdin enters this secret chamber, and so beings a series of fantastic adventures.
The metaphor that lives in this story (and many other stories) is that where we stumble is where the treasure lies. Time and again, you will have encountered tales that tell you about a hero or heroine who encounters troubles. When facing into their troubles regardless of their fears, that is when they become transformed into something more magnificent. They are forced to creatively respond to life rather than react to a situation. They must create a response to how they live differently and find a new way of being human in the world.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Anthology for Living"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Callan McDonnell.
Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements, ix,
Introduction, xi,
1. Awareness: Negative Space, 1,
2. Belief: Suspending Your Disbelief, 5,
3. Courage: Scheherazade, 11,
4. Discovery: Looking Out For A Hero, 16,
5. Existence: Becoming A Signal To Life, 22,
6. Fear: The Monster Under The Bed, 26,
7. Generosity: We Are One, 31,
8. Happiness: Follow Your Bliss, 36,
9. Imagination: Imaginary Friends, 41,
10. Joy: Chasing Happiness, 46,
11. Knowledge: Staying Inside The Boundaries, 52,
12. Life: Life Hacking A Good Life, 58,
13. Mindset: What Are You Thinking?, 62,
14. Nostalgia: Go To Your Happy Place, 68,
15. Openness: Feel The Feelings, 73,
16. Possibility: Seeing The Patterns, 78,
17. Questions: Tuning In, 83,
18. Resilience: All In Good Time, 89,
19. Sadness: The Narrative Of Loss, 93,
20. Transformation: The Guardians, 98,
21. Understanding: Distilled Experiences, 103,
22. Vulnerability: The Shame Of It, 108,
23. Wisdom: This Is My World, 114,
24. X-Factor: The Lure Of The Elusive, 119,
25. Yearning: Something's Missing, 124,
26. Zeal: The Shrine Of Your Life, 128,
Conclusion, 133,
About The Author, 135,