First Seek to Understand
tl;dr: An invitationto face the difficult truth, without retreating into what we think we already know. Invoking curiosity in challenging times, and a stance that centers wisdom over anger or fear.
What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse. Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away. And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.
–Eugene Gendlin
And here we find ourselves. Face to face with what is true. And because it is what is true, it is what we are here to interact with.
A devastating election result. And a crash encounter with reality.
An outcome that is consequentially unfolding before our very eyes. As we learn of Presidential appointments, and a regime that demands loyalty to its leader.
This note is not for everyone. I do not want to encourage any “spiritual bypassing.” There are difficult emotions to be felt. And a real concern for the most vulnerable among us. Plus, some of you just don’t want to hear it yet.
But it is a note for some of us right now. A call that speaks to a wisdom or longing within us. It is certainly a note about a place we can each eventually aim to get to. Because when reality smacks us in the face, it is always a good idea to reconsider our posture.
What is your stance before what is here to be lived?
When I invite us to “seek first to understand,” I am inviting us to take a spiritual stance.
But I am also evoking what a friend refers to as “the curiosity hack.” An intelligent stance. Whatever is arising, whatever our experience is, can we get curious about it?
Can we find out what becomes possible when we get curious?
The Most Vulnerable
We want to seek to understand the living concern of those who are most vulnerable. The suffering of immigrants who are facing mass deportation. The suffering of trans people, who have been so directly targeted by those who are now in power. The suffering of women who have lost sovereignty over their own bodies.
We do not want to lose touch with the plight of the most vulnerable. We want to cultivate hearts with the courage to feel. And we want to be able to act where we can act. Wherever right action is possible for us.
However, we want to be careful with our pre-fabricated answers. We want to question our certainty about what we think are the best ways to take a stand. The most important thing we can offer is immediate care and protection. If we don’t have a way to do so, then it is essential that we spend time wondering about our approach to structural change. Something is not working. We want to know less. So that we can actually learn.
Ourselves
We want to seek to understand ourselves. Find out what is getting activated inside us. Times of great uncertainty can trigger our trauma response. We want to be careful here. Because this is how we lose clarity and our sense of ground.
We want to make sure we are contending with what is actually in front of us. Not with what happened years ago. We want to pay attention to the young parts that get activated inside of us. These parts will tend to be more reactive, more afraid and more protective than is most useful for us right now.
Of course these parts need care and attention. There is a reason these parts are up. But it is not wise to let them run the show. This is where we turn to our healing modalities. To therapy, embodiment, prayer, meditation, ritual, ceremony, and of course, community.
As we find ourselves anxious and agitated we want to pause. We want to notice whether we find ourselves in danger right now. We want to pressure test each moment of fear and hyper vigilance. Inquire into what is actually true. And if we are not in immediate danger, then we want to do whatever we can to settle our nervous system.
Human beings have never been completely safe. Total safety has never been part of the deal. Danger is integral to our condition. It is a defining part of our human experience. Which means we have ways to deal with it. We know how to take protective action when necessary. And we have tools for contending with our anxieties. Ancient tools. Wise ways of being.
It is time to reclaim them.
The Other
This is where it might feel too early for many of us. And I think that is completely fair. But freedom and agility are found here. We want to seek to understand “the Other.” The people who form the majority of voters that gave us this baffling outcome. We want to understand them beyond the caricature that has been fed to us. Beyond our solid conclusion about how bad, or how confused, or how ignorant, or how manipulated, we think they are.
We even want to seek to understand them beyond the words that we think we hear them say.
We want to understand them as people. As humans who are also afraid. As people who have also felt rejected, left behind, abandoned by a system and set of institutions that don’t seem able to fulfill their promises to any of us.
This is a tall order. Especially since the only way we know them is through amplified clips of hate and vitriol.
But I really am saying that this is our only answer. To seek to understand is the only way forward.
To get curious here is to open up to possibility.
Accepting That We Don’t Know
Ron Heifetz makes a distinction between technical change and adaptive change.
Technical Change works when a problem and solution are clear, and existing expertise can be applied.
Adaptive Change is necessary when a problem is complex. The solution requires people to learn, adapt, and change deeply held beliefs or behaviors.
Technical Change does not seem to be working here. Existing expertise seems to have failed us.
Adaptive Change happens at the level of values, beliefs and assumptions. This is the change that’s necessary right now. It demands the courage to question core values, beliefs and assumptions. And it is unavailable to us as long as we remain attached to what we think we know.
We’ve been hiding in certainty for too long.
Adam Grant recently wrote an NYT Opinion Essay titled: If You’re Sure How the Next Four Years Will Play Out, I Promise: You’re Wrong. He gives example after example of how our forecasts are inevitably off. For the better. As well as for the worse.
My favorite line in the essay says that: “the average expert was roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee.” Ouch. What will it take to accept that we don’t know?
What is true is what is already so. Everything else is still unknown. So our practice is about who and how we choose to be with what is true right now. And from here, how to turn toward a future that simply cannot be known.
Faith, Hope & Love
Byung Chul Han writes of the unknown when he makes a distinction between hope and optimism. He tells us that politicians promise to classify and quantify the future. And that this has nothing to do with hope. What they’re selling is optimism. And optimism is defined by a ‘sheer positivity’ that doesn’t accept suffering. It does not open us to the unknown. It sees a fixed future ahead. And a fixed future is always a lie.
Hope, on the other hand, is born of despair. It emerges from suffering and challenge and directs us toward novelty. Han says that “Hope is a searching movement… that enters into the unknown, goes down untrodden paths… into ‘what-is-not-yet’.” (h/t Alexander Beiner)
This connection between hope and the unknown reminds me of a dramatic quote I heard from Ralph Fiennes. Playing Cardinal Lawrence in the trailer to Conclave:
There is one sin which I have come to fear above all others. Certainty. If there was only certainty and no doubt there would be no mystery. And therefore no need for faith.
That is what this invitation is really about. It is an invitation to gather the love that we feel. Because it is love, love for our ideals, love for our fellow humans, love is what undergirds our agitation. We want to gather this love and to bring both faith and hope along with it. So that we can have faith, hope and love. And in this way turn ourselves towards what is now already so.
My therapist shared this beloved Thich Nhat Hanh quote after our most recent session:
The next Buddha will not take the form of a person. The next Buddha will rather take the shape of a community, a community that practices understanding and loving kindness, a community that practices a way of conscious living. This may be the most important thing for earth's survival.
And that is what I’m doing here. Calling us into becoming the community that is most needed. And this move demands that we eventually get to the practices of understanding and loving kindness. The path is not always easy, but that only makes it more important and necessary. Sometimes hard is exactly what is needed. We are the ones called to walk the road less traveled.
Find your breath.Find your ground. Feel your body. Look out the window. Get outside. Let yourself be with what is right here before you. Step away from the warped world of our screens. Find your gratitude and allow it to flood your senses. Get really, really curious. And seek to understand.
I am aware that I’ve gone on for a while now. But I still want to leave you with these words. They were dictated by “Love” to Elizabeth Gilbert. She is doing beautiful work showing us the practice of two way prayer.
I share them because I’m keen on perspective. And here Love speaks the perspective of a single human lifetime. All the way to the very end.
Thank you for being with me in it.
Lean in with your entire soul, then, and listen.
All of it is precious.
The heartache is precious, too. The way that things appear to your eyes to be wrong — that, too, is precious. The hurt. The difficulty. The unfairness. The terrible losses. That longing — that deepest, hardest, heart-piercing human longing — for everything to be different than it is. All of this is precious.
The pierced heart, for sure, is precious.
The things as they are, and things as you want them to be, and the things as they never can be — all precious.
The madness, precious.
What is precious, in conclusion? EVERYTHING.
Trust us.
You came here to experience life on Earth, and you are experiencing it. Don’t wall yourself off from any of it. Don’t allow a calloused shell to build up around your heart, nor worry or rage yourself into an early grave. Don’t hold your breath or brace yourself against pain. Stay open, stay radically open. Stay alive, stay radically alive. Keep your rib cage soft and your heart rate neutral and your eyes awake to everything, everything, everything.
The day will come (and not even we know when that day is) when you will die, and in those last moments of your life, there will very likely be an instant when you desperately wish you could hold onto ALL OF IT — every single detail of the reality of this world. You will see, “My God, it’s so precious, I don’t want to leave!” You will never know that more than in those final moments of your life.
What you call the ugly and what you call the beauty, how precious it ALL is, you will know. How precious it is to be alive, child — in creativity, in love, in terror, in hope, in hate, in despair. How precious. How precious it is to be alive.
You will know that you wouldn’t have traded one single moment of it for anything in the universe — for each moment IS the universe, rolling itself out before you.
Not one moment of it isn’t precious. Trust us.
Please don’t wait until your final breath to know this!
Embrace the world with your entire heart, child — just as it is. Be brave enough to really be here, my love. For all of it.
Stay here. Stay with us. Stay alive. Stay radically alive. You will never regret it.
We love you, and love them, and we love everything.