Perceiving Threat & Debt Versus Receiving Gifts & Lifts

If you haven’t been going through some sort of shake-down of late then maybe you’re avoiding the nature of reality these days. Shake down is the order of the day. There’s no getting around it. And no one can really support anyone else effectively because everyone is navigating their own shifts.

It’s not all bad by any means, but it is unstable. For my part, stability is what I’ve been craving and working to establish for mySelf, yet I cannot control others or the wider threads of change. I can only let go of the delusion of control, check my other perceptions, and carry on.

I’ve come to call sudden changes “steerage”. I’m headed, full-steam ahead, in the direction I think I’m going and then, wham! I’m hit over the head. In recent years this has been literal as I’ve been going thru my Chiron Return in Aries, which rules the head, and have had a number of actual blows to the head. Because I have to pause to tend to my wound, I’m given a moment to reconsider whether the direction I was so intent on heading is really the best one.

And in that pause I also come to see the play of what I call the Cosmic Chiropractor, the larger force of adjustment that puts me in a place I couldn’t have put myself. Anytime I move an insect from a place of danger I wonder whether it feels the same sense of displacement and anger I feel when I’m confronted with “steerage”. Or if the ant, worm, or grasshopper has more of the mind of Krishnamurti who said, “You know what my secret is? I don’t mind what happens.”

It’s the minding that causes the suffering. When I mind the seeming selfishness of others and their lack of consideration for how their actions (negatively) impact me, I feel threatened. Lately that has been at the vital level of stability of home and having it pulled out from under me. My ability to shift to seeing the gift has generally come after the fact, after the suffering and the outrage and whatever navigations have been necessary to move me to safety. I’m working on seeing the gift sooner. Seeing the lift from an unseen hand that pulls me to safety, whether I like it or not.

It’s also the minding, and even the suffering, that highlights what I value.

Which is not to say that I am willing to opt out on holding the “other” responsible for messing up my world. I would really love if folks were more considerate and had better manners TBH. But since I can’t control them, it becomes a dance and a chance for me to play the improv game “Yes, and…”. In this game, as in life, when someone makes an offer I don’t like or know what to do with, I say, “Yes! And…” and then proceed to add to their offer anyway, no matter how preposterous. An unskilled player, out of fear, will instead block the offer and the game ends. It all falls flat. So what if you’re afraid and you don’t know what to do with what’s presented? Run with it anyway. Turn threat into gift.

Easier said than done, of course!

Even when I do manage to carry on, it doesn’t mean I will want to play with that person again in the future. Strong improv troupes rely on established trust. So a large part of the adjustment to change is reckoning with the change of relations. I find now I cannot trust this person so I need to regroup in order to recalibrate trust within myself and with others.

I added debt into the side of not seeing the bigger picture because I often perceive that the change that has been thrust upon me is going to cost me. From that scarcity mentality, which may very well be based on so-called facts of low resources such as time, space, money, energy, I can’t see beyond my current need. And it might also be highlighted by the “other” making their move out of greed or thoughtlessness that further exacerbates my sense of lack, or being taken-from instead of given-to.

Right now I’m meant to be taking an environmental philosophy exam that involves using matrices from game theory to understand, predict, and steer human behaviours. Is it a Prisoner’s Dilemma, an Assurance Game, or a Chicken Game? Part of me finds it all so annoying. As an only child whose sports were also mostly solitary, I’m not a big fan of games generally and certainly not in human relations. I appreciate directness and clarity, coupled with kindness and compassion. Passive aggressive games in particular piss me off because they waste precious time.

Why can’t everyone just be honourable and do the right thing?

It’s not that hard. The right thing is the thing that has life at its core. Not just for one or some, but for all. I get it though. It’s about awareness, consciousness. We can’t do the right thing if we’re not even aware of what we’re doing in the first place. I do begin to see that being able to name the situation, and decipher the motivations, enables me to shift from insect on the ground moved by an unseen hand to the mind of the hand itself. What’s needed, as all-ways, is to…