What, how, where is my thisness built, found, unraveled, revealed, nurtured and shared and allowed to be?
Many years ago I worked under the care and guidance of a woman who gave me her time and attention and support. She grew up in, and still lives in Kansas. She used to visit me several times over two years when I was living and working in Northumberland.
After a few visits I learned that there was no point in trying to do what I might have thought of as proving to her that I knew what I what I was doing. I had realised that there was no point in pretending.
She saw past any attempt by me to be something I wasn’t, yet.
One day, when we had been working together, her shadowing me as I sat and walked and talked and listened with the people I was getting paid to support, she asked me this question;
”In your work, what is the most common answer you give people when asked a question around how they might do the right thing?”
I sat with her question for a minute, or maybe a few minutes, as I thought about what she was getting at, trying to find the right answer, trying to impress her, and I knew that honesty between us was the only way I would learn and progress… so I said what I felt, what I knew was my truth;
”I don’t know.”
She smiled and said;
”Yes, thats always the right answer, you don’t know how they might fix something they are struggling with.”
We both sat with this for a while, then she added;
“Even if, and maybe more so, if you do know, you are not going to tell them what you think or feel they should do, so ‘I don’t know’ will always leave them space to recognise that you trust them to find answers to their own question.”
And that short conversation taught me something that has been really useful in my figuring out so many of the skills that I need to develop in order to be able to be useful to those I care about and work with, and to trust my thisness, and theirs.
When I spend time with people I want well for (is there anyone I don’t want well for), being able to bring my thisness and encourage them to acknowledge and express their thisness… we may together find connection and understanding and the capacity for becoming more than the sum of our parts.
How precious it is to find that closeness and deep respect for the feeling of being connected to myself and another who is also feeling into their own connectedness.
So often when I write, I get to this point where I recognise that I am writing to discover how things, life, love, living… works it’s way through the complex, tangled understanding of myself and myself in relation with others.
And in here, a sense of selfishness shows up within me… all this effort… standing as if a gift for others… is really about me and my own doubts, struggles and efforts to make sense of what is right and what is wrong… and leads me towards the ways that all my understandings land here in these paradoxes.
These incongruent more than binary conclusions and outcomes.
Leaving me re-minding and re-pairing with; I don’t know.
Noticing that I use the word, maybe, often, maybe more than often, and this creates space for consideration, options, becoming comfortable with overlapping paradoxical knowing not knowings.
So, when I ask that question at the top of this page;
What, how, where is my thisness built, found, unraveled, revealed, nurtured and shared?
I know that I cannot completely separate out the thisness that I have been taught is ok to share and the thisness that should always be hidden… from the thisness that is mine regardless as a birth right.
While leaving me here, learning how to trust that, with care, and consideration, I can rely upon my thisness that is often, maybe, beyond the approvals, comfort and expectations of others.
And this raw (roar?) thisness that insists on the Möbius strip that holds selfishness and kindness in the same joined up twisted reality, bringing the truth that all is this and that, me and you, us and other… deep within the oneness… of my thisness… and… maybe… of your thisness too.
Bearing in mind and body that I don’t know.
I never know, and can keep quiet when I might know, as she showed me, sharing thisness with someone, self or other, is always bringing us closer without necessarily doing.
All ways coming from the same source… trusting, caring, keeping and sharing ourselves despite of and beyond what we were taught to suppress.
Yes and… maybe, thisness is unique and common and held individually and within all… bringing our connections as each other, together.
