Evacuation of the Interiority

It’s October 12^th 2015: Have you seen your inner landscape?

We focus a lot of energy on exteriors. The way we look. What we do. What we have. Who we know. Where we live.

We are in constant dialogue with how to improve our external circumstances. There is an assumption that we have much to learn about everything, but our inner life.

I know everything. About everything. About me. Presumptuous? Um, yeah.

Totally haughty, bratty, know-it-all and ignorant. Yet, this is kind of the way I walk around most days.

Me to myself about myself:

Well, you’re just not the kind of person who will ever love being in front of crowds or public speaking. You are better behind the scenes in clogs with no make-up on bossing people around.

This means you will have a hard time getting your passion projects off the ground.

You’re disciplined about getting to the gym, but not about eating 10,000 miniature oyster crackers for breakfast and No Pudge brownies for lunch so long as you mix it in with green juice and salmon.

This is warped, amazing, unusual and balanced in an offbeat extremist sort of way and means you will never really fit into normal society.

Are these things true? Yes and no.

Are they static, stationary and carved in who I am stone?

1. They are not. But the know-it-all bossy voice in my head is constantly telling me ‘how it is’ and ‘who I am’ and ‘what we need to do’.

I listen, because like Joe and the boys, I am slightly afraid of this me.

She is just the slightest bit demanding, unrelenting and loud.

I was unexpectedly re-introduced to her by Dan Harris, ABC correspondent, co-anchor of Nightline and regular reporter for 20/20 and World News with Diane Sawyer.

 

He was being interviewed about his bestselling book, 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Truly Works.

Mostly he was talking about developing a healthier relationship with the asshole inside his head.

And I thought oh, that’s who that me is.

Many of us are impatient, intolerant and indignant toward ourselves.

Self-kindness is a possibility only when we have run a literal marathon, are extremely sick or suffering great loss– essentially only under rare and radical circumstances.

I think this might be why I come close to bursting into tears when people say genuine, unexpectedly kind things to me or appear to be genuinely interested in something I have to say.

I am surprised by this kind of kindness.

Not because I think there aren’t plenty of generous people, but rather, because genuine acts of kindness are not commonplace.

First, most people are just trying to get through their day. They are polite kind. Check the “I was a good person” box so they can finish their list of obligations and go to bed before doing it all again.

To be genuine requires time, care and at least a modicum of introspection.

You cannot be genuine with others if you have not looked inside yourself– if you have not considered your inner landscape with both curiousity and compassion.

Few consider this a worthy endeavor. Some a self-indulgent escapade. But I am not talking about the naval-gazing, study-the-details-of-your-pain introspection.

I am talking about the great mystery that lives inside all of us.

If we cannot even be curious about who we are, how can we genuinely express interest in others?

I rarely offer this level of generousity to myself.

However, this morning I was reading John O’Donahue’s poem, “A Morning Offering”, and there was a verse that leapt out at me:

May my mind come alive today

To the invisible geography

That invites me to new frontiers,

To break the dead shell of yesterdays,

To risk being disturbed and changed.

What is this invisible landscape? And how can I begin traversing it?

It reminded me of an interview he gave with Krista Tippett, “On the Inner Landscape of Beauty”, before his death in 2008. He said this:

“Your identity is not equivalent to your biography…

there is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there’s still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you… And we do live in a culture which is very addicted to the image, and I think that

there is always an uncanny symmetry between the way you are inward with yourself and the way you are outward.

And I feel that there is an evacuation of interiority going on in our times. And that we need to draw back inside ourselves and that we’ll find immense resources there…

I always loved what Mandela said when he came out, and I was actually in his cell in Robben Island, one time I was in South Africa. Even after 27 years in confinement for wrong you never committed, he turned himself into a huge priest and come out with this sentence where he said,

“You know that what we are afraid of is not so much our limitations but the infinite within us.””

We are afraid and threatened by the success and originality and inner beauty of others because we have not yet embraced our own. I know when I am feeling trapped and stagnant it is because I have not let myself breathe.

Because I have not been willing to look beyond my biographical circumstances into the bigger, vaster, more imaginative and thrilling mystery inside.

Photo by Anders Mohlin