What do you do when one day you wake up and feel like a stranger in your own life?
Things seem familiar, the couch, the dogs, the kitchen utensils, the reflection in the mirror (vaguely), the people in your life… but the whole just does not seem to be what you might have though it was.
Maybe I’m getting the cart before the horse, or looking at the experience from the wrong way..
It is not so much that the view from the inside fails to recognize the outside world as a coherent whole. It seems to me to be more profitable to see it from the other direction – first to view the entire cobbled together world of the surroundings, and then … mystifyingly, to try to place oneself in that whole, and finding that the seams don’t line up, the purposes are mismatched, the shapes don’t fit in their prescribed holes.
That is more like what I feel. Not that the world around me is strange, because it is not. It is that I am a stranger to It. To the purposes and shapes and ways of the space I find myself in. Vaguely out of balance.
I suppose, just “listening” to the words as they form on the screen before me, that one of the first things I’d pick apart from the statements above is that “being in balance” can be approached with either a holistic or atomistic tack. I would think that the former would be an easier and more satisfying means of getting there, but if it does not “flow” naturally to an individual then the latter approach would at least be a move in the right direction.
I don’t actually think that you can achieve an enteric, gestalt kind of experience by “mounting the pieces together”, vis a vis the atomistic approach. None the less, better the diligent attempt than to just abandon the effort as being too far out of reach.
This whole line of inquiry makes me think that there is only one place in the world where I believe people are “taught” how to achieve holistic ends – zen monasteries. Even then, I don’t believe that everyone entering into the study succeeds in opening those doors of perception.
That is really what it is, holistic, gestalt, integral … it is a way of perceiving things that includes an awareness of, I’d even say knowledge of, things that are irrational and not able to be verbalized, yet applicable to the efforts of the individual with that perception. Because they are irrational, and resist being compartmentalized or separated from the whole in which they exist, they are not easy to transmit in the forms which we normally use to impart knowledge to one another. They are not teachable in the ways we usually think of “teaching”. In fact, as I said earlier, I don’t really know that it can be taught.
I think people come upon a holistic, enteric way of perceiving by chance, by osmosis when in contact with others who perceive the world in that way, by having their perceptual apparatus severely distorted (be it by physiological or psychological means) until it “breaks” for long enough for a new coherent order to be understood, or simply by gift.
I liken the effort to teach someone about the gestalt, or about the experience, like trying to teach someone about how an orange tastes and smells, without ever introducing an orange to the pupil. Like trying to describe to a human being how objects appear in the dark when you look at them with echolocation. Or more specifically, how the face of your loved ones, your mother, your child, look like on a molecular scale. Hard to imagine? Impossible to imagine! Not a single person has ever, nor will ever, know what that is like, and no amount of “teaching” will ever impart the experience to a person. So what’s the problem? The problem is that experiences are inseparable from their observers. We can no more impart a new experience by using words, pictures and concepts, than those tools are able to become what they describe.
You can lead someone to a situation, to a perspective, to a point of view, but you cannot make them see.
And where then does all this come back to the origin of this post? So what of the person who feels strange in their own skin, out of place in their own life?
I don’t know.
I don’t know, but I feel that the way this all ties together has something to do with a thought that crossed my mind yesterday: Life has high points and low points. Some people seem to strive very hard to pack as many high points into their experience as possible. Most people live a life that is a series of points with neither many high or low points. Is one group more Alive than the other? I think not. The measure of Life is not in the number of “highs” had, but in two facts: that there are points to be strung together at all, and to the way those points relate to one another.
In more concrete terms – being really ALIVE is not so much a matter of globetrotting, thrill seeking, and consuming luxuries, but in how each of us makes sense of our day to day experiences, be they cleaning homes, delivering pizzas, composing symphonies, raising food, caring for children, sweeping streets, loaning money, inventing gadgets, fixing all manner of things…. Living is not in the highlights, it is in the connective tissue that binds all of our heartbeats together from moment to moment.
Enchanted Princesses and their maids are no more or less able to be ALIVE, despite what common sense or opinion has to say on the matter.
And back again… to the start… where should a person go when they find “themselves out of place”?
Now I have an answer of sorts: Into their head; For “place”, “person” and “out” are all defined by who is doing the looking, and how they understand what they see.