One of the transitions adults go through as we grow our lenses on complexity and mess is from certainty to a felt-sense of how… mixed life is.
Feels like we're living in the middle of lots of what I think of as dynamic tensions, within a pressure to create clear, pure rules.
I'm wondering if part of moving through the world in a wiser way is resisting rules and instead living inside those dynamic tensions, where there are no clear ‘right’ choices, only annoying nuance.
How do you handle these?
Here's one I'm… embarrassed? ashamed? of…
I’ve signed up for a paid ‘yoga’ app that is wildly customisable (style, level, session length, amount of instruction, voice), and makes sure over a period of days you've had a good variety of movement. All of which to say, I’m finally actually moving my body once or twice a day.
I'm trying to make it more likely that 70-year-old Meg can move, and I'm working on being more present in my body, after years of chronic dysphoria-led disembodiment.
So, through that lens, this app is pretty bloody perfect.
However, I'm extremely aware that it also has less than zero to do with a connected system of spiritual knowledge or even anything or anyone from India.
Whilst I was on my free trial, I spent a while searching for Indian owned yoga apps or Indian yoga videos but they didn't work in a way that suited my neorosparkly brain or they asked for way more time than I can spend each day.
So I either
- find some other type of balancing/stretching/strength activity that isn't (what one of my besties calls) colonised stretching that I won't actually do for more than a week (ask me how I know)
- go back to running (which only serves cardio)
- haul my ass to a class run by someone from a real lineage (money/time/who?)
- work out how to teach myself and make my own sequences (?)
- try and MAKE myself do something I'll find very hard to actually stick to
or… do something I don't find particularly ethical.
Add it to the list of an Evil Prime subscription, owning a car, and not hassling our landlord enough about our gas boiler?
This is what I mean by dynamic tension.
I want to be building my strength, balance and flexibility in ways that suit my brain/timetable AND I don't want to be contributing yet again to the centuries-long project of White violence.
I want to (more publicly) denounce genocides AND it helps literally no one if I lose my job or jeopardise the service I manage.
I want to be working on nurturing our medium-term work culture AND there's so much detail to deal with day-to-day.
I want to talk to the landlord about converting our gas hob so that we're not directly burning fossil fuels every meal AND I love the immediate control I have over the temperature (plus we had a terrible experience with an induction hob at our last place).
I want to nurture a human and humane team environment AND we have to operate within challenging KPIs to keep our funding.
I want to date more AND oh my god don't make me struggle through messaging so many strangers.
I want to read All The Books/knit/play jazz piano/draw/paint/make my own clothes AND I want to rest my brain at the end of the day with Grey's Anatomy reruns.
I want to knit impressive garments AND I find it wildly stressful to spend 100 hours making something that might not fit.
I want to throw my lot in with the climate crisis direct action lot AND we cannot live without my salary.
I want to give it all up to run a tiny bakery AND I want to do everything I can to bring us closer to another, better world (and we all know the bakery is just an escape fantasy lol)
Through a black and white lens, the ethics of some of these are very clear.
In practice, in our current world, it's much less straightforward.
Reminds me of when a (non-day-job) colleague came to me with a dilemma she was in, about someone she was connected to who was beginning to express some anti-trans views.
She came to me for advice, and maybe because I was tired, I ended up saying that it was up to her to decide what fitted with her feminism, what sat right with her, her spirit.
We live in a wildly confusing world. We absolutely shouldn't excuse ourselves from self-education and doing the work of anti-oppression, AND there's also a challenge in facing the truth that we often have to, at least in the short term, live within in a tension that can't be resolved.
AND we need to be conscious of who benefits from that compromise and who loses. And how that sits with our spirit.
AND how we find peace in our body and take the next wise and timely action with so many unresolvable loops.
AND how we do our best to live with integrity whilst we exist in this particular moment/the space-time continuum.
Erm.
I don't have a neat conclusion, here.
Discuss?