Stand still.
The trees ahead and the bushes beside you
Are not lost.
Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still.
The forest knows Where you are.
You must let it find you.
A First People’s elder story/poem rendered into modern English by David Wagoner
As the poet and corporate consultant, David Whyte, recounts the context of this poem, he tells us that it was told by elders to children who might find themselves “lost” in dangerous and foreboding woods in the Pacific Northwest. This was not an esoteric existential reflection on the nature of being, or sentimental new age navel gazing, but a very practical instruction set about fear and finding the necessary wherewithal and mindset for survival. He goes on to suggest that the sense of lostness can give rise to a heightened sense of attention rarely found in other situations. That we find ourselves in the unfamiliar and the mysterious can open us to a kind of receptivity and awareness that sharpens our capacities and reveals new possibilities.
I have recently read a beautifully written book by Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Hers is a series of essays on the fine art of lostness and what happens when we enter that space physically or psychically. In her work, she suggests that people do not cease to be lost by returning, but by turning into something else. They gain a new orientation and new ways of being in the world.
So here we are working with clients and working within families. Here we are clothed in a veneer of certainty and expertise. Yet, with even the smallest bit of self-awareness, we know that this professional persona is a mask – a false promise to a world that demands hype and hyperbole. We do good work that can be hard and demanding. In the midst of that good work, we can find ourselves pretending certainty, but just as often recognize that we know better. We think we understand what the world wants – it wants to be less lost – it wants to be more certain. So we allow our adorned certainty to become the strategic face we present to the world. Yet when the veneer is tested and scratched through (which is not hard to do) we find we are in the middle of “mystery” and “not knowing”. In this place, our confidence, if we are fortunate, slides into courage and our certainty into curiosity. We become humble – which comes from the Latin “humus” or earth – and therefore grounded in ways we were not before. We come to touch the elemental in these places.
Our clients and their families are often lost. They traverse familiar paths – often moving in well-worn circles, passing the familiar landmarks and looking for the never appearing signs of their liberation in what is already known to them. This seems a kind of lostness bereft of hope and it often gives rise to disillusionment, cynicism and profound resignation. What they seek is not Here. It is to be someplace different – to be emancipated from a kind of confusion and even suffering. And we want to help them.
The curious thing is that often the first useful step is to stand still. To recognize that for all the fear and uncertainty and pain, this space is not a space of lostness, but of deep familiarity. In one family I worked with, a family member said that the conflict in their family was the familiar and the real fear was who they would become without it. They held tightly to their dysfunction because to release it was to lose themselves. This sort of insurgency is common. Moving from the familiar invokes a different relationship with “lostness”. It requires a move into what cannot be known except at the edges. Is it any wonder that this movement engenders fear?
And here is what the truly good advisor does. She does not bring” answers”. He does not bring “solutions”. She does not bring “products” or he “strategies”. Rather, she brings courage. He brings wholeheartedness. The truly good advisor enters the mystery with empty hands and thereby gives the client permission to move more deeply into the mystery as well.
There are certain clues we find about how to be lost well. The first is already present to us in what is described above – it has to do with courage – the ability to stand still, to breathe, to observe and thereby to metabolize fear and anxiety. Our evolutionary reptilian instinct is to panic. It is natural to do so. But that is not a strategy for mammalian survival. As the first people’s poem states – the world has made a place for us and it is Here. We are not lost, we are invited to know and be known. Solnit’s book explores this in wonderful, wandering detail.
Other clues are found in the recognition that lostness exists most unmistakably at the extremes of autonomy. When we are lost we are alone. We are disconnected from others, from our environment and even ourselves. We are so autonomous we have become unknown even to our own psyches. The timeworn method of finding ones location again has been to wander. But wandering is not aimless – it is about a kind of emergent orientation. And in that orientation comes connection. Good wandering exposes one to new situations, new people and new connections. And often this wandering does not have us leave where we are at all. Rather it involves looking with fresh eyes at what we had assumed was familiar. We observe our environment and see things we never imagined were there. With clear vision, unencumbered by assumptions, we see the people in our lives in a new light. We feel into the uncertainty with curiosity and find connections we had ignored or taken for granted. Our world becomes not new, but re-newed. In this way our world is transformed and we along with it to the point that it is sometimes difficult to tease these apart – did we change or was it the world? And so we migrate from the extremes of autonomy into a recovered sense of belonging. This is the deeper value of facilitation in families: when done well, it gives permission to wander and in that wandering discover new worlds and new selves. Powerful facilitation creates new ways of belonging out of whole cloth.
Yet another clue lies in the senses – both internal and external. For most of our lives we sleepwalk – we lose ourselves in the trances of everyday life. We follow our routines on automatic pilot. The mindfulness movement seeks to break this thrall through a kind of willful concentration, but as one who has meditated for years, the notion of paying complete attention all the time has struck me as a fool’s errand and in fact, the process itself in Buddhist circles is designed to be self-defeating for a purpose. What arises in these Buddhist practices is first a recognition of its futility and then a deeper inquiry into what is actually going on. This act of willful attention self-destructs and in that immolation something else emerges. In contrast, when we are lost we become unmistakably, organically and acutely attentive. There is nothing forced about it. We simply awake from our dream walking. When we are lost, we can become conscious even of the shape of our attention in ways we rarely do when we are wedded to our certainty and otherwise asleep. As the MIT Sloan School of Management professor Otto Scharmer suggests, the way in which we shape our attention actually determines outcomes. And so when our attention is focused and sharp – when our internal and external senses are naturally alive – different outcomes become available that were not even possibilities before.
The role of silence provides yet another set of clues. Silence often gives rise to a new way of seeing. In art and philosophy a great deal of attention can be paid to what is figure and what is ground. The figure is what normally grabs our attention – it is the object we are focused on. The ground is what we ignore. The two faces that make a vase are the classic example of the reversal of figure and ground. Our language is about figure – our silence is about ground. When we are lost and lapse into silence, the ground – the context – often comes into sharp focus while figure recedes. In that sense, we come to pay keen attention to what we have ignored and inevitably start to shed our obstinate ignorance. In fact, one way you know you are lost is when this reversal spontaneously appears and figure and ground have reversed themselves. And when you get really, really lost you can find that the relationship between subject-object-ground disappears and the sense of boundaries between these evaporate as the stuff of illusion. This is what Buddhists and Hindus call enlightenment (or at least one aspect of it). Thus to be lost – and to become silent in that lostness as a way to host an incipient revelation – opens us to deep wisdom and even immanent acceptance. This state of raw being can give rise to a kind of liberation that, in turn, my actually shift the fundamental relationships of things in a way that makes the more immanent revelation a transcendent, transformative exchange.
A final set of clues arises from the practice of inquiry. Once the panic subsides, once we have stood in stillness with heightened senses, once we have confused figure and ground, and once again have begun to make new connections in silence – we are well-prepared for the discipline of inquiry. Here we can start to ask the really good life-giving questions – the questions, that, if answered well, will “change everything”. (I often ask my client families to identify that core question – the transformative question – the answer to which would both become the path and the destination of their collective aspirations). It is in living with these everyday disciplines of deeper inquiry that one begins to find true solutions and answers worthy of great questions.
Of course there are other clues and other ways to navigate this lost space and the fundamental humanity we share allows us to tread on this familiar ground and describe it together. Modernity wants to banish lostness from our lives. Post-modernity wants to drown us in it. Yet there is an experience beyond suppressing the lostness or being subsumed by it. In this field beyond, we will instead have befriended lostness as our guide. Families that can enter this place almost inevitably find their way and indeed may have found it already. They are not lost.
© 2014. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.
— October 4, 2014