I’ve been walking around with some words of the late John Lewis in recent days-words he lived and embodied-that in the space between the world as it is and what we long for it to become, we are called to live “as if” the possibility we aspire to is already present. Our job is to make it more visible, more vivid, more true.
Interestingly, mysteriously, when you do this, you begin to see differently. You get oriented to notice tendrils, traces, the new shapes of emergence that we miss when we are oriented around the distractingly noisy and obvious memes of “what is.”
This is an excerpt taken from Krista Tippett’s, “On Being” a podcast https://g.co/kgs/rTuPXR that a friend of mine not too long ago sent my way. She had not been on my radar ever since and I’m over the moon that she is.
I remember vividly hearing “to live and act as if” within the walls of Al-Anon. To try to “act as if” the path of healing for my qualifier was their job and mine was to heal my own ism of being addicted to him/her/ them. I was floored and felt some shame creeping in, as wasn’t it my job to keep juggling all of these balls and keep them from falling? That was my ism of codependence edging its way in and always it was rooted deeply in chaos and fear rather than in love.
This realization came in slowly, yet I knew it was true and that I was the only one who could help myself with it. Meetings, my sponsor, literature, all of these important tools aided me in learning how to “act as if” even before I could truthfully say I was even remotely there.
In my meetings I heard the sharing of how others were looking at themselves and their part in the family disease of addiction. As one of us heals our internal systems and generational wounding, it cannot help but to create a magnetic field of boundless healing that is universally held and felt by everyone in our spheres. This made absolutely no sense to me at first, yet as I gazed around the circle I could sense that whatever was being served, I needed desperately. I wasted no time and got busy reminding myself to keep the lens turned inward rather than outward.
“Living and acting as if” slowly remerged on my grief/healing path and it did not feel as foreign as it had with my first go around. I surrounded myself with those walking beside me and most importantly a few steps ahead. Desperately trying to absorb and observe how they were living and breathing into this life they were thrust into without a map or their beloveds in them. I did not fully trust words written in books and had to witness firsthand women who were speaking of their children in the present moment. Embracing both the laughter, tears, pain, heartbreak, hope and everything else in-between to perhaps believe that it might just be possible for me too in time.
Presently, I find this way of being to not feel as much like imposter syndrome which it most certainly did at first decades ago. It can still come sneaking in disguised as such, yet I notice it now and in doing so it doesn’t generally require anything more than an acknowledgment. This is an ongoing practice and learning curve which is feeling abundantly healing and gentle to actively engage in.
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