Everything I have ever written or thought is unoriginal. Everything I have ever attempted has been attempted before, and will be tried many, many more times in the future by hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people. And often with better results.
This used to bother me immensely. Thinking like this would lead me into dark closets of inhibition. Why write this, or notice that, or say this, or try that if it has been done and can be done better? It never helped to hear others say, "Oh, Surya, what you just said/did reminds of blah blah blah person who said exactly the same thing a hundred years ago and blah blah blah famous person who is saying exactly the same thing right now in his latest book."
I'm less bothered now. Not because I feel I have some unique contribution to make to the world. But because the pain of inhibition is much worse than the pain of discovering that someone else out there is doing whatever I am doing, and much better. As I have been letting go of inhibition, I am actually finding that I am seeking out people who are doing things better than I am to be my teachers, if they'll have me. Better writers, better community organizers. Better poets, better runners. People who have wisdom. People who let me tag along and be a copy cat. People who give me an apprenticeship. People who take a risk on me, even if that means that I will defy them. People who are willing to risk that I might one day surpass them, but will teach me anyhow.
And so, with that small prologue, here are my uninhibited but completely unoriginal thoughts about the idea of taking risks and letting go, knowing fully well that there remains a lot to be learned from the greatest risk takers and letter go-ers of them all, of past and present. And also through the continuous act of living.
I think that taking risks and letting go is the only way to learn how to be alive. Yes, I may appear alive for all intents and purposes, blinking and breathing and all, cells dividing, hair graying, but I may not necessarily be living.
If you let go a little, you encounter this wonderful phenomenon called "sharing," which is the foundation for human civilization both in our evolutionary past and as we know it now. If we never learned how to share, we could not have developed cooperative societies. We would have no tribal groups. We would have no culture. We would have no systems of government, authoritarian or democratic alike. We probably wouldn't have learned how to talk either. Speech is a deeply reciprocal act born out of the need to share in one another's interests and communicate them effectively. I'd venture to say, if we hadn't learned to share, we would have never become human beings. I can go out and hunt some wildebeest alone and fail and be hungry or succeed and hoard the meat, but if I share in the action with others, we'll probably be more successful. It is in my interest that others in my group are well fed and happy-- because then they'll keep going out there to hunt and gather with me, etc. (You get my point). Much of collective survival depends on this ability to share in our interests and act upon them together.
So if you let go a little, you learn how to share, how to be a human being. But if you let go a lot, you might encounter something called... God? Dharma? Nature? Yourself? Emptiness? Nirvana? Since those are all pretty loaded and somewhat contentious ideas, I won't get into any of it, but instead just keep describing from my own experiences, which is all I really have.
About one month ago, I let go of my job. I wasn't let go. I didn't quit. I just let it go. I had taken enormous personal risks in taking the job. It hadn't existed before I got there, so I was in the creative act of inventing my work, with others. I didn't get paid a lot when I started, and I didn't get paid that much more when I let it go. I had actually envisioned myself working in that particular job for another 2-3 years, digging in long enough to help create a robust organization around my position, and then walking away when I felt like the work could continue on as I had envisioned it, without me.
In trying to create something that has never existed before, you have to gamble away a lot of what you know and what you see around you for something that isn't real yet, but could be. And you have to ask others to gamble with you. You gamble with money, relationships, time, trust, particular ways of organizing ourselves in roles and organizations. In our case, what we were gambling for was a community in Northeast Los Angeles where students of all walks could get a phenomenal education, where parents were powerful, where public education was less broken and more collaborative. Several schools came together to create my position, putting funds together for my contract so that I could begin my work as an organizer. We got as far as incorporating a nonprofit and our first few grants/donations. We got 15 schools together and hundreds of education stakeholders actively coming together across the usually divisive landscape of charter schools and traditional public schools. We tapped into people's appetites to build power.
And then, I let go. Not of the commitment I had. Not even of the work itself. But I let go of my particular way of coming at it, which meant I also had to let go of the paycheck. When I realized that I was asking people to gamble what they didn't have at the moment (time and money, most predominantly), there was no way to justify continuing to work the way I had been working. There was plenty of desire, plenty of solidarity. People were even willing to give me money they didn't have, and I was willing to wait around for it. But desire alone does not an organization make.
When I made the decision to let go, there were a few hours of free falling, a good deal of crying, some anger, some disappointment in myself and others. But slowly as the hours and days slipped by, the clouds kept parting and a few moments of peace and clarity would slip through. It was an inexplicable kind of clarity, even faced with the very real prospect of not being able to buy groceries or pay rent.
I think there is a little death that occurs inside of everything that is let go. And my courage to face death each time the moment comes is what teaches me to live.
Buddha knew this, and he had a great way of teaching this lesson. He brought his meditators to funeral pyres to watch bodies burn. He asked people to imagine their own bodies burning, or rotting in a grave, bloated, eaten by worms, turned into soil by thousands of little decomposing forces. Intellectually, it is not too difficult to grasp that I too will die, will rot or burn. But being willing to experience death in daily life is quite another thing. And it only comes about through practicing for death- by feeling with all your body that which is slipping away in each act of letting go.
Letting go means I have to be willing to not know what happens next. It means that things in my life that I have come to love and grow attached to will not exist anymore, or will exist in altered ways.
Knowing when to let go brings wisdom. I probably hung on to my job about 6 months longer than I should have. But it could have been worse. I could have clung to it for years and done a lot of damage to relationships, to trust.
I am lucky to have found a position now where I can continue a lot of the work I started with others, though in a different capacity. But I couldn't have known that with absolute certainty before letting go of my position. At some level, I just had to surrender.
The better I get at knowing when to surrender, the better the nature of my risk-taking becomes. Many worthwhile things I want to see in my life and the world around me require great risk. This is not to say that risk taking should be reckless. The opposite is in fact true-- anything worthy of the risk required to achieve it requires a great deal of consideration, of calculation. You should have a good enough sense of what will be gained by success or lost in failure. You should do a lot of research and ask a lot of tough questions of yourself and others. But then, you just have to be courageous and face the gaping chasm of what is left unknown, what is beyond your capacity to calculate. And jump!!!
People in love do this all the time. Parents often do this with their children. Entrepreneurs, inventors, organizers, writers, investors, all sorts of interesting people out there do this. I hope to one day be joining the ranks of the best out there, one risk and thousands of little deaths at a time.
_________________________________________________
For those who haven't yet, take a risk! Please make a donation to my 1/2 marathon running efforts on behalf of AIDS Project Los Angeles!http://apla.convio.net/goto/surya
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Friday, August 19, 2011
On the Courage of Compassion (Fearless Writing Series, Day 2 of 10)
Today, I am lying around reading Rules for Radicals instead of cleaning my house, doing the laundry, doing the groceries, or returning phone calls. In fact, I've got 6 books by my bed stand, 2 at my desk, 4 in the car, 3 in the bathroom, and 2 more coming in the mail. If I did all the chores BEFORE I started reading and writing, then I would feel less guilty, but eh whatever. I'll do it eventually. I don't know where I learned the rule that everything should be in order before doing something that I enjoy. Some of my best writing has come out of total chaos.
Anyhow, today in the bathroom, Pema Chodron quoted Albert Einstein as saying,
I particularly like Einstein's opening depiction of human beings here. We are temporal phenomenon that occupy a defined amount of space just as any other thing in our observable universe. Redwoods live for millennia, stars for a few billion years, insects for weeks or months. Our timeline is about a century if we are of excellent health. We are lucky to have sense organs to perceive our universe, and a very complicated brain to try to make sense of it, even if our attempts are inadequate.
And yet, fully knowing we have this timeline, recognizing our sheer good luck to be motile and have eyes and ears and gray matter, so much of our lives are spent living unconsciously, slaves of our desires and reactions to things we like and don't like, feeling sorry for ourselves or angry with the world, lost in our personal pain, numbing and distracting ourselves. I have spent a fair amount of my waking hours in the past couple of decades this way, though I can't speak for the rest of you.
So Einstein's task, "to widen the circle of understanding and compassion" to eventually encompass the entirety of the universe, while daunting, seems important and not something just to try to do between episodes of Mad Men. How to go about doing this, though, is a completely different thing.
To give myself a place to start, I try to do so with other human beings, a few dogs and cats that I know, and an occasional bamboo or cactus plant that I am trying not to kill. The particularly fun thing about trying to understand and have compassion for other human beings is that we share overlapping timelines and can potentially spend years together trying to understand one another. There is also the fact that we are rapidly changing and things that I may have understood (or misunderstood) about you 5 years ago may not hold true to you today, and I have to re-discover who you are all over again.
The thing that is hardest, but the most rewarding, ultimately, is the part of compassion that requires you to enter someone else's world, completely. Last month I was at a community organizing training, and Sister Judy was teaching the piece on how to do a relational meeting. We were put in pairs and she coached us as we tried to be attentive, be curious, discover who the other person was, try to get a glimpse of what stirs them, what has made them who they are. And oh yeah, to do it in 20-30 minutes. In a demonstration for us, Sister Judy sat with a trainee from Long Beach. I don't know how to describe it quickly, but in essence, because Sister Judy was asking the right kind of questions, and being still, and being unshake-able, she pretty much completely entered, for a few brief minutes, the woman from Long Beach's world. And that world was filled with pain, trauma and violence-- domestic violence, childhood sexual abuse, but also with power, recovery, anger, resilience.
Most of the time, we walk around being polite to each other, keeping our scars hidden. And if someone does happen to break down (or break open) in front of us, a fear can arise about what to do--we get agitated, we want to fix or resolve whatever is troubling them, we want them to get over it if it happened a long time ago, we want them to get up and keep going. Or we want to run away. We don't want to fall off the cliff with them. We don't want to quake in their shoes as the frightened child they may have once been.
I don't know who said it-- someone important and quoteable, no doubt-- but I've been thinking a lot about the idea that courage is not the absence of fear, but the ability to keep taking action even if it scares the shit out of you.
I think it takes courage and resolve to have understanding and compassion. Compassion is not for lightweights and dilettantes. You've got to free fall, even if for only a few seconds, with someone else. And sometimes you can relate-- oh yeah, I also quaked in fear a lot as a child-- and sometimes you can't immediately, but you can imagine it happening to yourself, whatever it might be. And if you stick around long enough, you'll start to see other things about the person that neither or you had seen before. And you'll see things in yourself that you had never seen before.
I think a prerequisite for going around having compassion for others is to start with yourself, with your own being, bound by time and space. To stick around with yourself when things are getting rough and dirty. To hold the hand of the child in you that might have gotten hurt at some point. To cheer on the rebellious teenager. To comfort the broken-hearted in you. It takes a lot of work, and it can't be done all at once. Maybe 30 minutes a day, or 5 minutes, or a few breaths here and there. Courage comes this way, and it opens up space in our head to be with others, to allow ourselves to be encumbered by their lives and experiences. But you can't just wallow in your pain and others' pain. You've got to move with them, you've got to run or walk alongside them.
I think the 1/2 marathon training I am doing with APLA is also trying to help us do this-- runners, donors, everyone, to enter the world of someone who is living with HIV/AIDS and free fall for a while, and then run with them.
More on the concept of "running with someone" tomorrow, part 3 of the series! And perhaps a little bit about tribalism and its strengths and limitations. Or maybe a whole new topic. Now off to do some groceries.
Make a donation, nothing to fear!!!!!!!!!! :)
http://apla.convio.net/goto/surya
Anyhow, today in the bathroom, Pema Chodron quoted Albert Einstein as saying,
A human being is a part of the whole called by us "the universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest-- a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening the circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
I particularly like Einstein's opening depiction of human beings here. We are temporal phenomenon that occupy a defined amount of space just as any other thing in our observable universe. Redwoods live for millennia, stars for a few billion years, insects for weeks or months. Our timeline is about a century if we are of excellent health. We are lucky to have sense organs to perceive our universe, and a very complicated brain to try to make sense of it, even if our attempts are inadequate.
And yet, fully knowing we have this timeline, recognizing our sheer good luck to be motile and have eyes and ears and gray matter, so much of our lives are spent living unconsciously, slaves of our desires and reactions to things we like and don't like, feeling sorry for ourselves or angry with the world, lost in our personal pain, numbing and distracting ourselves. I have spent a fair amount of my waking hours in the past couple of decades this way, though I can't speak for the rest of you.
So Einstein's task, "to widen the circle of understanding and compassion" to eventually encompass the entirety of the universe, while daunting, seems important and not something just to try to do between episodes of Mad Men. How to go about doing this, though, is a completely different thing.
To give myself a place to start, I try to do so with other human beings, a few dogs and cats that I know, and an occasional bamboo or cactus plant that I am trying not to kill. The particularly fun thing about trying to understand and have compassion for other human beings is that we share overlapping timelines and can potentially spend years together trying to understand one another. There is also the fact that we are rapidly changing and things that I may have understood (or misunderstood) about you 5 years ago may not hold true to you today, and I have to re-discover who you are all over again.
The thing that is hardest, but the most rewarding, ultimately, is the part of compassion that requires you to enter someone else's world, completely. Last month I was at a community organizing training, and Sister Judy was teaching the piece on how to do a relational meeting. We were put in pairs and she coached us as we tried to be attentive, be curious, discover who the other person was, try to get a glimpse of what stirs them, what has made them who they are. And oh yeah, to do it in 20-30 minutes. In a demonstration for us, Sister Judy sat with a trainee from Long Beach. I don't know how to describe it quickly, but in essence, because Sister Judy was asking the right kind of questions, and being still, and being unshake-able, she pretty much completely entered, for a few brief minutes, the woman from Long Beach's world. And that world was filled with pain, trauma and violence-- domestic violence, childhood sexual abuse, but also with power, recovery, anger, resilience.
Most of the time, we walk around being polite to each other, keeping our scars hidden. And if someone does happen to break down (or break open) in front of us, a fear can arise about what to do--we get agitated, we want to fix or resolve whatever is troubling them, we want them to get over it if it happened a long time ago, we want them to get up and keep going. Or we want to run away. We don't want to fall off the cliff with them. We don't want to quake in their shoes as the frightened child they may have once been.
I don't know who said it-- someone important and quoteable, no doubt-- but I've been thinking a lot about the idea that courage is not the absence of fear, but the ability to keep taking action even if it scares the shit out of you.
I think it takes courage and resolve to have understanding and compassion. Compassion is not for lightweights and dilettantes. You've got to free fall, even if for only a few seconds, with someone else. And sometimes you can relate-- oh yeah, I also quaked in fear a lot as a child-- and sometimes you can't immediately, but you can imagine it happening to yourself, whatever it might be. And if you stick around long enough, you'll start to see other things about the person that neither or you had seen before. And you'll see things in yourself that you had never seen before.
I think a prerequisite for going around having compassion for others is to start with yourself, with your own being, bound by time and space. To stick around with yourself when things are getting rough and dirty. To hold the hand of the child in you that might have gotten hurt at some point. To cheer on the rebellious teenager. To comfort the broken-hearted in you. It takes a lot of work, and it can't be done all at once. Maybe 30 minutes a day, or 5 minutes, or a few breaths here and there. Courage comes this way, and it opens up space in our head to be with others, to allow ourselves to be encumbered by their lives and experiences. But you can't just wallow in your pain and others' pain. You've got to move with them, you've got to run or walk alongside them.
I think the 1/2 marathon training I am doing with APLA is also trying to help us do this-- runners, donors, everyone, to enter the world of someone who is living with HIV/AIDS and free fall for a while, and then run with them.
More on the concept of "running with someone" tomorrow, part 3 of the series! And perhaps a little bit about tribalism and its strengths and limitations. Or maybe a whole new topic. Now off to do some groceries.
Make a donation, nothing to fear!!!!!!!!!! :)
http://apla.convio.net/goto/surya
Things I think about while running (Fearless Writing Series, Day 1 of 10)
1. I wish I was like Haruki Murakami. He runs a marathon every year. And writes really long, brilliant books.
2. I'm not Haruki Murakami, I'm me. I write little snippets of things every once in a while. And I run in short outbursts.
3. Why am I doing this again?????
4. I hate running.
5. I don't hate running, I hate myself.
6. I don't hate myself, I hate this moment.
7. Glad I unpacked that.
8. 1 mile down, only 12 to go!
9. Goddamit.
10. Oh my god I have so much money left to raise for this training. Eep!
Last Saturday, I hit an all-time low in my 1/2 marathon training experience. I got to Eysian Park 15 minutes late and barely made it to start with my pace group. Then I got some cramps and realized my monthly thing was starting and I didn't have any lady materials with me. Then I fell behind my pace group. Then I fell behind the pace group behind me. Then I hit mile three and just started walking, furious with the fact that I was walking and bleeding everywhere and cramping and that I still had 3 miles to go. Then I went the wrong way. By the time I finished, I had in fact only gone 5 miles, not 6, was on the verge of tears, and just a mess.
It is a much more romantic thing to run on behalf of something or someone greater than you and your small miseries. Or run victoriously, at just the right pace, improving as you go. Or even to run with grief/sadness, suffering nobly. It's quite another to run with irritation, frustration, trying to will your bedraggled @$$ to go another mile, take another step.
Up until last Saturday, I was pretty sure that all the running I was doing was the root cause of my rapidly improving life. Since I started, I have re-connected with a lot of my creativity. I have shaken some of my fear of asking people for money, and have raised over $1300 already for AIDS Project Los Angeles. I have felt a lot of my feelings again-- grief and joy most predominant, general well-being cutting through underneath. I got the best haircut of my life. Notably, I also bucked up, quit my job respectfully and found another one within a week. I went to New Orleans for a few days. I now have a few full weeks of absolute freedom before the new one begins. And it has only been about a month since I started running.
I credited (and I still do) many of these changes to the physical movement that running entails. I have a theory, based on nothing but self-observation, that big internal shifts must coincide with movement. Like a child twisting in the birth canal to be born out of a narrow pelvis, my own mind requires movement in order to break through some of the walls I have built up around it.
So hitting a wall last Saturday was not something I anticipated, and it threw me. My body was not interested in running. It was interested only in a hot water bottle and a few episodes of Star Trek. My mind was DEFINITELY not interested in running. Which may account for why I hit the wall so hard. And then followed a few days of feeling sorry for myself and the unfairness of it all. Mind and body had ganged up against me and all I wanted to do was run a goddam 1/2 marathon.
I went on my first run today since Saturday. I woke up at 7 but didn't get out of the door until 9, when it was already really hot. Impatiently, I did a few stretches, impatiently, I started running, trying to get it over with. Somewhere after the first mile, I saw an older woman running and walking, running and walking just like me. I had noticed her when I got there, but I only really "saw" her after the first mile. I think to see someone, I had to shake off some of the self-centered, self-pitying vibes that were clinging to me all week. I noticed that she was running in a sweatshirt, which was insane given the heat. I started running beside her while she walked and we had an easy conversation about why we were running, what her children were doing, her health concerns, our mutual concerns about the state of public education, and what we were trying to do with our lives. Then she left the park and I did as well soon after. Driving home, I realized that after I began running with her, my pace had clicked-- I was going just the right speed again. I did a mile without even realizing it, just running and talking with her.
It is a little counter-intuitive for me, but I think that a big way to get through my walls, my fears, anger and inhibitions, is to pay attention to others, to move with them and not against myself.
Stay tuned! Day 2 of 10 of this Fearless Writing Series coming up tomorrow!
And if you haven't yet donated to AIDS Project Los Angeles, please do so here!!!
http://apla.convio.net/goto/surya
2. I'm not Haruki Murakami, I'm me. I write little snippets of things every once in a while. And I run in short outbursts.
3. Why am I doing this again?????
4. I hate running.
5. I don't hate running, I hate myself.
6. I don't hate myself, I hate this moment.
7. Glad I unpacked that.
8. 1 mile down, only 12 to go!
9. Goddamit.
10. Oh my god I have so much money left to raise for this training. Eep!
Last Saturday, I hit an all-time low in my 1/2 marathon training experience. I got to Eysian Park 15 minutes late and barely made it to start with my pace group. Then I got some cramps and realized my monthly thing was starting and I didn't have any lady materials with me. Then I fell behind my pace group. Then I fell behind the pace group behind me. Then I hit mile three and just started walking, furious with the fact that I was walking and bleeding everywhere and cramping and that I still had 3 miles to go. Then I went the wrong way. By the time I finished, I had in fact only gone 5 miles, not 6, was on the verge of tears, and just a mess.
It is a much more romantic thing to run on behalf of something or someone greater than you and your small miseries. Or run victoriously, at just the right pace, improving as you go. Or even to run with grief/sadness, suffering nobly. It's quite another to run with irritation, frustration, trying to will your bedraggled @$$ to go another mile, take another step.
Up until last Saturday, I was pretty sure that all the running I was doing was the root cause of my rapidly improving life. Since I started, I have re-connected with a lot of my creativity. I have shaken some of my fear of asking people for money, and have raised over $1300 already for AIDS Project Los Angeles. I have felt a lot of my feelings again-- grief and joy most predominant, general well-being cutting through underneath. I got the best haircut of my life. Notably, I also bucked up, quit my job respectfully and found another one within a week. I went to New Orleans for a few days. I now have a few full weeks of absolute freedom before the new one begins. And it has only been about a month since I started running.
I credited (and I still do) many of these changes to the physical movement that running entails. I have a theory, based on nothing but self-observation, that big internal shifts must coincide with movement. Like a child twisting in the birth canal to be born out of a narrow pelvis, my own mind requires movement in order to break through some of the walls I have built up around it.
So hitting a wall last Saturday was not something I anticipated, and it threw me. My body was not interested in running. It was interested only in a hot water bottle and a few episodes of Star Trek. My mind was DEFINITELY not interested in running. Which may account for why I hit the wall so hard. And then followed a few days of feeling sorry for myself and the unfairness of it all. Mind and body had ganged up against me and all I wanted to do was run a goddam 1/2 marathon.
I went on my first run today since Saturday. I woke up at 7 but didn't get out of the door until 9, when it was already really hot. Impatiently, I did a few stretches, impatiently, I started running, trying to get it over with. Somewhere after the first mile, I saw an older woman running and walking, running and walking just like me. I had noticed her when I got there, but I only really "saw" her after the first mile. I think to see someone, I had to shake off some of the self-centered, self-pitying vibes that were clinging to me all week. I noticed that she was running in a sweatshirt, which was insane given the heat. I started running beside her while she walked and we had an easy conversation about why we were running, what her children were doing, her health concerns, our mutual concerns about the state of public education, and what we were trying to do with our lives. Then she left the park and I did as well soon after. Driving home, I realized that after I began running with her, my pace had clicked-- I was going just the right speed again. I did a mile without even realizing it, just running and talking with her.
It is a little counter-intuitive for me, but I think that a big way to get through my walls, my fears, anger and inhibitions, is to pay attention to others, to move with them and not against myself.
Stay tuned! Day 2 of 10 of this Fearless Writing Series coming up tomorrow!
And if you haven't yet donated to AIDS Project Los Angeles, please do so here!!!
http://apla.convio.net/goto/surya
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