No Position is Correct for Long, Episode 379
We often hold onto positions, opinions and beliefs as a way of shoring ourselves up against the uncertainty of the world. And while our positions may have much integrity to them, it's most often the case that they're not the whole story, especially when faced with the complexity of the world, as well as the complexity of ourselves and other people.
Holding on to a position too tightly can easily lead us into difficult places, but it can also be difficult to soften a position and even more difficult to let it go when it is called for. We can so easily feel shame or embarrassment, strong inner criticism, or we can face the criticism of others. In this conversation we venture together into exploring what it might take for each of us to cultivate our own inner flexibility so we can meet the unfolding world with the responsiveness and wisdom that it calls for. And what it might take for us to be a welcome to that change in ourselves and to change in others.
This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
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Here’s our source for this week:
No Position is Correct for Long
Every human position has a problem with it. Believed in too much, it slides into error. It's not that no position is correct; it's that no position is correct for long. We're perpetually slipping out of absolute virtue and failing to notice, blinded by our desire to settle in—to finally stop fretting about things and relax forever and just be correct; to find an agenda and stick with it…
It's hard to be alive. The anxiety of living makes us want to judge, be sure, have a stance, definitively decide. Having a fixed, rigid system of belief can be a great relief.
Wouldn't it be nice to just decide to live as an anti-happiness zealot? … Completely consistent, you'll never need to be confused again. You can just stalk around, having sold your bathing suit, looking down your nose at everything.
For that matter, wouldn't it be nice to just throw down on the side of being happy? To decide to live life as an ardent pro-happiness advocate, always striving to celebrate, dance, have fun, maximize your joy? But then, before you know it, you're [obnoxious] on Instagram, standing in a waterfall with a garland of flowers, thanking God for blessing you with this wonderful life you must have somehow earned via your immaculate mindfulness.
As long as we don't decide, we allow further information to keep coming in… It reminds us that any question in the form "Is X right or wrong?" could benefit from another round of clarifying questions.
Question: "Is X good or bad?"
Story: "For whom? On what day, under what conditions? Might there be some unintended consequences associated with X? Some good hidden in the bad that is X? Some bad hidden in the good that is X? Tell me more."
George Saunders
from ‘A Swim in the Pond in the Rain’
Photo by Cici GUAN on Unsplash