I know a young woman who, along with her husband, has inspired me to deepen the process of asking the question “Does it have to be this way?”
Continuing on my last post, thinking about how attempting to perform daily random acts of kindness over an extended period shines a light on those times when I hesitate, or in all honesty walk away even when it is clear someone needs kindness (least anyone starts thinking I am some kind of saint…although I believe we have clearly established that I am “nice,” right?) . This year will reveal many things, both the good and the challenging, which whirl around my brain and through my various guts and innards making it sometime easy and sometimes hard, even impossible, for me to perform RAK. Some of this goop I know nothing about. Some of this goop I know quite a bit about, although I will confess that it turns out that even the goop I firmly believe I am keenly aware of and have well under control, turns out to be more goopy than I thought. Huh, perhaps I should have stated that up front several posts back, sort of a disclaimer: Let’s not make any kind of assumption that at the end of this year, everything is going to be wrapped up in a tidy package. That would be most awesome though. I wonder if I would get some sort of prizes for being so wise and having used such good thinkology? I will look into that. In the meantime, I am a gloriously complicated person and that’s all we got to work with.
Back to RAK: Why is it that sometimes performing simple random acts of kindness can be difficult, make me feel uncomfortable and even require me to push past fear? An important part of the underlying goop, for me, is the fear associated with Ignorance and Want.
The second child that the Ghost of Christmas Present reveals to Scrooge is a girl named Want. Like ignorance, she is “wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable” and “yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility.” For me, Want pushes on two painful pressure points: The wants of others/Others and my own wants.
Our strengths and weakness are elements of who we are along the same continuum. This has been said by like a 100 gazillion people, but I’ll give a nod to Ralph Waldo Emerson (“Our strength grows out of our weaknesses.”) because that seems fancy and intellectual. I have a history which has shaped me into an empathetic, nurturing, giving, “nice” kind of guy (among my many wonderful qualities). This “niceness” byproduct of my history oozes out across all areas of my life and is part of my best self, and is the source of a significant challenge for me when it comes to RAK. Part of the history which hand-crafted this gloriously complicated human involved interacting over many years with some important people in my life who were struggling with their own histories such that they were Bottomless Pits of Want. Their very human and understandable drive to fill that empty wanting place creates an intensely lonely isolation and desperate hunger that interferes with the belonging and connection they fundamentally need. Now picture pouring pitchers of water into a sieve, trying to fill it, and, because you are an empathetic, nurturing, giving, “nice” kind of human, you do this for years, decades.
Too melodramatic? It is hard to find the right balance. Your patience is appreciated, and your abandonment of this post would be understandable
Why does this matter for what we are talking about? What does this have to do with RAK? Oh, my bad. I thought the connection was obvious. This has to do with RAK because there are some people whose wants and needs are massive, huge icebergs floating through the shipping lanes of our daily lives. Some are easy to spot (the homeless), others more difficult (pretty much anyone we might encounter). Of course RAK is not about rescuing people or in any way trying to fill Bottomless Pits, but being fully present often means becoming aware and acknowledging on some level that there are abandoned, neglected, hideous, wolfish children under the Ghost of Christmas Present’s robes. So, for me, there is both the reminder of sadness of futile attempts to fill a sieve and of the pain that remained for that person with the Bottomless Pit, and the sting that comes from stepping into someone else’s day and sensing the depth of the iceberg below the water line. I think I am mixing my metaphors, but hopefully you will kindly stack them into neat piles for me.
My own wants? Yeah……. undoubtedly there are issues here that RAK will continue to raise (Oh, goody! Another valuable growth experience), but this is a start (Thanks, Mr. Dickens!). Want- abject, frightful, hideous child. Think about people in your life who are on the Bottomless Pit end of the spectrum. What descriptors come to mind? Don’t worry, you don’t need to tell anyone what those descriptors are, so please be honest. How about this one; imagine a friend is telling you about someone they think might be a good person for you to date. They are attractive, smart, funny, nice, have a great job, you share interests, oh, and they are needy (Insert noise of a loud buzzer). Right? Nobody wants to be with someone needy and nobody wants to be needy, especially if you have had encounters with the child Want. Being needy, being Want is a fast track to rejection and a one-way ticket to Dumpsville, population me. But 1) everyone has needs and wants, you can’t get around that, and 2) Our culture (notice I switched blame to our culture rather than my history? Clever move on my part) doesn’t provide good role models for how to appropriately express needs and wants. I double checked the Owner’s Manual for Being an Adult- nowhere does it define what constitutes being “needy.” How the fuck are we supposed to know if we are being needy or not? A wise strategy then becomes to hide our wants (under the robes of the Ghost of Christmas Present seems a good place), which, as you already know, doesn’t make the needs and wants go away and leads to all kinds of spectacular relationship and human interaction disasters. Insert feedback loop of crazy and dysfunction.
Let’s not forget that Want has a brother. Want and Ignorance are a package. What are we supposed to do? I don’t have clue of what we supposed to do. Here is an important piece for me to learn from RAK. This adventure involves being willing to interact with others by being open to the moment, humble and without expectations about my role in their day (and vice versa), and without judgment of whatever comes up inside me pre-, during and post interaction.
Ugh, this really doesn’t capture the depth of what I am trying to convey. Maybe you could flesh it out in your head and shape it into something that communicates something important? I would appreciate it. In the meantime I will continue working on finding ways to understand and describe this whole process, this something that RAK is stirring.