Icebergs, Oceans, and Aging into Wise Elderhood
I’ve talked a lot in recent weeks about our need, globally, for a critical mass of wise elders to rise up and answer the call of leadership and our responsibility, locally, personally, to take the path toward elderhood. I haven’t, I think, done enough to give some cogent methodology for doing so. To lay a trail of breadcrumbs that might help those so inclined to act on their impulse to take such a path.
The first thing I want to clarify is the tendency for ‘conventional wisdom’ to be, in actuality, the near enemy of wisdom. It sounds wise, it looks wise, it is common practice… but on closer inspection it is disease masquerading as health, toxicity hiding under a veneer, a perpetuation of old hurts defending itself as sound and traditionally grounded practice. This realization first began to take articulable shape for me after reading First Break All The Rules — a management book that explores what separates exceptional from ‘run of the mill’ leadership and management. It was the first time I read a thoroughly researched and cogently theoretical book that debunked so much of the ‘conventional wisdom’ that I had experienced as counterproductive but didn’t have the data or analysis to back up, just the intuition that what everyone told me I ‘should do’ as a manger — seemed backward to my understanding of human beings. While we’re pulling on this thread, I also want to flesh out the near enemy concept a bit more — as it will be critical to today’s article and several others in the hopper to be published soon. My exposure to the concept came from Brené Brown’s most recent book Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience. According to Buddhist psychology, a near enemy is an emotion or trait masquerading as a virtue. In her podcast series she interviews Chris Germer, and here’s his take on near enemies:
(I)t’s a beautiful concept. It comes from Buddhist psychology, and it really invites discernment between the thing itself and misunderstandings or ways in which we fool ourselves that we are close to the thing itself, but we’re actually off in a way that we’re getting further and further from the thing itself. Far enemies, which is basically the opposite of what you’re talking about, are easy, but it’s the near enemies that require introspection and reflection and care.
In Atlas, the concept is a fulcrum around which she builds a theory of meaningful connection by using it to differentiate (discern) between authentic connection and the multitudes of ways that we subtly get it wrong (the near enemies of meaningful connection). I have also found it a powerful concept for inviting or deploying discernment to things that matter deeply. For me, it is like a distillation filter, bringing us closer to the true thing by separating out the similar-but-not-right-things commonly mixed up with it.
With this in mind, lets revisit our core interest — what can we do to cultivate the wisdom we need to grow into wise elders? And when is ‘conventional wisdom’ really just a near enemy of the wisdom we’re seeking to cultivate — lulling us into complacency and keeping us stuck? I’ve mentioned before that my experiences with aging people who have become progressively more stuck and toxic as they get older has been a major impetus for me — trying to figure out ‘how to NOT end up like that’. Well, like any negative example — we can look at what those people DO and ask, if it is true — as I think it is — that everyone is trying to do their best, then what near enemies have seduced them from finding the wisdom, peace, and maturity that they sought in their lives?
“That’s just who I am.”
I think that this phrase captures two things: an accepted piece of conventional wisdom AND a near enemy of radical self-love. I’m borrowing the phrase radical self-love from Sonya Renee Taylor and her book The Body Is Not an Apology — which she defines:
“Radical self-love to me is our inherent sense of worthiness.”
You’ll notice that the phrase ‘that’s just who I am’ is very rarely used to defend good behavior, its foremost use is to defend our ‘worthiness’ when we know that we’re doing ‘unworthy’ things… Let me try to unpack this for you using a story from my own parenting journey. In my house, growing up, anything like ‘playing with your food’ was out of bounds, not in the ‘please don’t do that, it isn’t good manners’ way, but more in the ‘pound the table’ and ‘get yelled at’ way… So, low and behold when I became a parent I shared this ‘pet peeve’ — this emotional overreaction to ‘playing with your food’ or ‘playing with a container that had food in it’ or whatever other food-play adjacent behaviors kids naturally do because they are playful and exploring and learning. So, early on — I would get triggered by these behaviors and although I didn’t ‘yell and pound the table’ the way I had been exposed to, I would still overreact in intensity and emotionality whenever this would happen — and sometimes I would yell, and sometimes I would feel the rage building up inside when the ‘food play’ didn’t stop ‘quick enough’… So, I started to get very uncomfortable with that — I could feel that I wasn’t being the father I wanted to be, the father I needed to be, the father that my son deserved. My first move was to calmly explain to my son that this ‘food play’ thing was a pet peeve of mine, that it came from the even more extreme reactions that my family had about it, and that I needed his help to avoid this trigger — that I needed him to take the food-play edict more seriously so that I wouldn’t get so upset. (Some of you are feeling this already — this is the reasonable sounding near enemy.) After a while, and I mean years, I started to realize that having my son bend his life, his way of being, around my pet peeve was literally a perversion. Sure, by not yelling and blowing up about it, I had significantly lessened the transmission of intergenerational trauma, but I hadn’t stopped it — I had just psychologized it. I hadn’t healed it, I had just developed a work-around — a work-around that put much of the burden on him, so that my burden would be less. This was not worthy of the father that I deserved to be or that he deserved to have. So, what I came to was this: every pet peeve, every trigger, every hang up is the tip of an iceberg in the ocean of your soul, your work, when you find such a thing, is to mark it with your attention and melt it down with your radical self-love. Let’s tie this back in to our observation about stuck and toxic older people — as we age, as our ocean of life-energy begins to wane and our sea level drops, and drops, and drops… those icebergs get grounded. They make contact with the sandy ocean bottom of our being, then, it is not just the tip sticking out, it is an ice mountain — jamming up the landscape and the shipping lanes of our soul. It is really kind of a double damage — if we do our life-work and melt those icebergs down, we have more water, more life energy, to work with. If we ‘walk on eggshells’ around our hang-ups (or navigate around them, to extend our ocean metaphor) then we end up inhabiting a tumbled jumble of tundra, a frozen wasteland of crevasses and ice mountains and boulders — we hear rumors that there is still a sea underneath, but we can’t feel it or find it or live in it or BE IT anymore… all we have left is a frozen wasteland and the rumor of salt water. It isn’t my son’s job to avoid my pet peeves, it’s his job to help me find them and it is my job to heal them! As Sonya Renee Taylor reminds us, this healing is not a solo or individualist act, it is an act of and in and by community — an act impossible without the love and support and relationship of others. Yet, I stand by my statement — it is MY job, a job that only I can accept responsibility for.
If You Can’t Get Out of It, Get Into It!
I’ve never done Outward Bound, but according to Parker Palmer in his book Let Your Life Speak, this is the motto of the program — dropped on him halfway down a cliff on his first attempt at rappelling. Of course, I’ve been saying it to my son so often that he’d like to ban it from my vocabulary… But I want to use it here as an invitation to the parts of your life you’d sooner leave behind. Because it seems easier, to mark those iceburgs of unhealed trauma on your map, to share that map with friends, family and coworkers so that they can ‘conspire’ with you to stay away from your triggers, and you can get on with ‘other stuff’. This is the near enemy of living. This is the spiritual unconsciousness that the wisdom traditions warn us of. You are walking away from the proper work of your life to do something else — now maybe you’re doing something you believe to be noble — maybe you’re teaching children, healing the sick, protecting the public, working for justice… whatever unhealed trauma you bring into that work will manifest in, and undermine, that work. This is the law of karma. This is the natural consequence of leaving those icebergs unattended.
So, when you notice a pet peeve or a trigger or a hang-up — don’t map it and lie to yourself that you can move on now that it is mapped. Like an iceberg, that thing that you encountered — only 10% of it is above water — only 10% of it is showing-up in your pet peeve. It is an invitation to drop anchor and do some work. An invitation to discover and wrestle the 90% of the trauma that’s hiding under the waves. My friends — sailing on doesn’t get you out of the confrontation with those things. It simply postpones that wrestling match to a time when you likely won’t have the energy or the give-a-shit to do the work… and you will spend your final days wondering what malicious force consigned you to the frozen wasteland that your life has become. And the only answer worth a damn is you. The near enemy version of you that accepted the conventional wisdom, the lie, that triggers are things to be avoided. As Orson Scott Card says in the Ender Series:
There is no teacher but the enemy.
So let the iceberg BE your enemy, let it BE your teacher. Let it teach you the path to your own worthiness — which you never lost, only forgot about. Let your radical self-love transmute into the love you can give to your children, your family and friends, the world… You are worthy to be that kind of light, that kind of natural power, that kind of being.
