Hello you,
Do you ever wish that you were one of those people who could just get on with it? Who could just go along with things? Who doesn’t have a smattering of existential crises while deciding what to do with your one wild and precious life three minutes of spare time on a Tuesday morning?
I don’t. I think that there is great intelligence in continually returning to big questions, like What is my life for? Where am I putting my attention? And scary questions like What if I’m wrong? and Is that a drowned mouse in my dishwasher?
I also think it is intelligent to let ourselves try out answering those questions, and to live into the answers.
The other day I overheard someone say, What does success mean to you? and it made me shudder. It’s not a bad question exactly. It’s just that the whole atmosphere of the word ‘success’ feels icky to me.
I wanted to pick it up by the tail and fling it off the back deck. But first I wanted to take a photo of it, and send it to you so we could marvel together at its wet fur, and its sweet and creepy little claws.
‘Success’ implies having moved in a straight line to arrive at a known destination. Sure, some measurable goals have value (e.g. are CO2 emissions going down? Are children still being murdered in Gaza?) but so much of what we have been trained to run towards just does not fucking matter. How do we untangle ourselves from this way of being?
Consider this, by Aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta:
“We don’t have a word for non-linear in our languages because nobody would consider travelling, thinking or talking in a straight line in the first place. The winding path is just how the path is, and therefore it needs no name.
One man tried going in a straight line many thousands of years ago and was called wamba (crazy) and punished by being thrown up into the sky. This is a very old story, one of many stories that tell us how we must travel and think in free-ranging patterns, warning us against charging ahead in crazy ways.”*
What if the whole point of life isn’t to succeed, but to play? This is a question that I like. The word ‘play’ has a fan-shaped tail and it flits around the tī kōuka tree outside my window. I can’t catch it, and wouldn’t want to, even if I could.
It doesn’t know exactly where it is going, and it takes a winding route to get there.
I’m in the middle of teaching my poetry course Path of the Poetic Heart. In it, I offer an approach to editing where we intentionally let go of the idea of making our poems better. Instead, we practice making them different.
We let go of trying to succeed in our writing and let ourselves play with lots and lots of different versions. We bend, mould, squeeze, stretch, snap, shake our poems. We twist them, wring them out, and blow air into them until they pop.
We let them evolve and change without judging the changes before we have actually let ourselves experience them. (The good thing about writing poetry is that the stakes are low — it’s very easy to save every version, and you can usually return to where you were before).
What I notice is that when we let go of trying to control what our creations are becoming, we become much more sensitive to their life force. We learn to identify and connect with their beating hearts, their wings, their beady eyes: the parts of them that must stay no matter what, and let go of everything else.
This makes for art that is vibrant, congruent, and interesting. You might even say it’s more successful.
But perhaps more importantly, the practice itself is valuable, because it helps teach us to discern what is essential, and to let go of the way we think things are, in service of what they are becoming.
In a world where so many of the structures, institutions, thought patterns, belief systems and ways of life that we have been given lead to dead ends, it is the perfect time to practice listening for what really matters, to put our attention there, and feed the rest to the worms.
With love,
Rata
* Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta (2019, p. 21).
P.S. Interested in doing the Path of the Poetic Heart course? I may run it again in the springtime if there is enough interest. Let me know if you are keen and I’ll put you on the list.
Thank you for reminding me that I'm off the hook. Lol. I'm eyeballs deep in Business erry day, stupid success metrics up the wazoo. It's easy to forget that it's all very silly.