RESOLVE // RESOLUTION
originally published on January 2, 2019 on now-defunct tedpackard.com
My friend and helpful gadfly, Peter Yencken, has a strong opinion on the word, “inspire.” Imagine an Australian accent saying something along the lines of, “Inspire, that means to breathe, you know that? Inspiration, taking in breath. Now, if you inspire someone else, what are you doing? You’re breathing for them. How is that going to work out? If I inspire you to do something, the moment I leave, there’s a good chance that you’ll stop doing it. And I just spent all that time breathing for you. What I’m interested in is conspiration. I want to breathe with you, not for you.”
So. This morning, I felt a conspiracy with my friend, Renee Byrd. She wrote a heartful piece about our culture of resolutions with the New Year. She was sensitive to our culture that aims its arrows at our most vulnerable and despised parts - those two go together most of the time - as we collectively agree that it’s time to attack the parts of ourselves that we or society doesn’t love. We call them resolutions, but they’re hardly that.
She said that we withhold the love and instead approach resolutions with self-hatred. That doesn’t sound like it’s going anywhere to me, either. Except for maybe somewhere worse.
I feel extraordinarily lucky. I spent the last six years in a community of people who make a practice of deep listening - to each other, to the land, and also to themselves. Inner tracking is one name for it, the process of really looking at your own tracks, your own paths through life. Where are you traveling? What patterns emerge when you look long enough, when you look from a high enough perspective? What shows up if you are honest with yourself about what you see? In animal tracking, they say that those who track alone are never wrong. It’s the same with inner tracking.
For me, it takes a lot of modeling. I mean that I need to see someone else doing this to understand how it works. What I’ve seen the most is that, while a lot of insight is gathered from self-knowledge, much of it is discovered in the cauldron of community - in small groups, in boundary-pushing activities, and in mentorships or friendships righteous enough to both draw out those kinds of conversations and to also call out what is seen, to truly reflect for someone else what tracks are seen on the ground.
This is not to say that it’s pretty. It’s not all sitting cross legged in front of each other, saying, “Yes, I am like that, thank you,” until the cows come home. It’s messy. It’s alive.
It comes in rupture, more than anywhere. If the friendship is true, if the connections are honest, then rupture is inevitable, and we find out more about each other in the fray. It doesn’t have to look like argument or aggression to be rupture, though it might be uncomfortable. It could be, simply, that the human connection creates such fertile ground that new, beautiful parts of one’s self start to grow. That tends to create conflict with those other parts that we don’t like so much, and so, resolve, resolution to change, grows.
What got stirred up in me reading Renee’s piece was that this is not how things tend to happen in our dominant culture. As a society, we demonize the parts of ourself we want to change, that we want to resolve. Over-eating, being lazy, not taking risks, being mean to others, and on and on. How many ads, how many cultural images, can you imagine that prod you into hating some part of yourself while trying to sell you a product? What resolutions can you imagine that have their roots in that self-loathing?
All of those parts were built by us, for us. They didn’t appear out of nowhere, they were grown - in response to one’s environment, or - guess what - you came in with them. We are born with a perfect constellation of patterns from our parents, from the experience of being in the womb, from the life of our grandmother (in whom our egg lived until the birth of our mother), from the ancestral traumas of our forebears, and from the position of the stars around our not-yet-sealed skull. We come in with a lot, and it is our fate to live with it, to live through it, to act it out, and to wonder upon it.
Michael Meade calls this Fate - all the aspects of ourselves that we arrive with, the conditions of our birth and subsequent life that are not grown, but are more or less the ground we’ve got to stand on. This great pattern is often what we are acting out - or where we are acting from.
To be clear, this is childhood, too. Our great complexes, that we work with for the rest of our lives, are a marriage of what we brought coming in, and all those formational experiences that taught us the way this world works.
Every moment of life is teaching us, and it’s teaching us more and deeper than we can know as it’s happening. Meade gives this example, of a mother who feeds her baby before she ever cries out for milk. There is another mother who, no matter how much the babe cries, cannot figure out that her daughter is hungry. Both these babies, Meade says, will spend the rest of their lives working out, “Where is the milk coming from?”
The one who never got fed will not know how to recognize the thing she’s looking for, even if it’s right in front of her. The one who was fed before she knew she was hungry will never know the depth of her own longing - until something is taken away from her.
And we’re going to make a New Years Resolution about that. Right.
I’ve been a cheerleader of personal change, for friends, for myself, for too long to take a lot of it seriously. Someone says they want to change their behavior. That sounds good, but if they’re not addressing the reason for the behavior, it’s just going to come back. Or shift a few degrees and grow another ugly habit.
I see it with drugs, with food, with screen addiction, with body movement habits. Aside - I don’t say “exercise,” because even that is a word that aims at the pathology of it all. If our lives as humans were actually sane, we would use our bodies dynamically and usefully as a means of living, and any idea that we need to “exercise” literally wouldn’t exist. You see what we’re up against. It’s more than a habit, there are layers here - cultural, personal, familial, and if you’re not digging into them, you’re fated to build the same kinds of structures for yourself over and over again.
So now is the part where I tell you that I actually made New Years Resolutions.
Renee wrote in her piece about the arbitrary feeling of New Years - that it’s not the solstice, it’s not tied to the moon, that it’s seemingly tied to nothing but the calendar year, which is just more dead white men naming months after themselves.
I’ve found in recent years, that I resonate with the concept of the solstice - with the dark time, where the sun goes into the south and seems to die for three days, only to be reborn and come to life again by heading north. I love the myriad ways that astronomical event has been told in story by different cultures and religions.
But our culture, our crazy culture, it cares not for such things. Christmas music plays the day after Halloween in our halls of commerce. The internet seduces us with sexy sales, guilts us into giving useless crap to others that is just going to break and then tells us to indulge and buy something for yourself, too.
Then there’s family. Whatever your relationship with family, they bring up Stuff. It’s a human fact that the family that made us also gave us many of our wounds. This is not to say that there are not gifts that come from those wounds, but it is considered a given in depth psychology that no one - no one - escaped from their family being fully accepted for who they are.
That is a task that takes some resolve - rooting around down in the earth for those parts of ourselves that were not accepted - and loving them. Showing them acceptance. To be clear, this doesn’t mean we have to act them out in harmful ways, we just have to accept that they are part of us, and if we hate them, we are hating ourself.
For me, the holidays have a unique tendency to stir up those deeper patterns, to inflame the likely addictions, to put on display the expressions of the parts of myself that desperately need some love. Drinking, being detached emotionally, judging others. Ugly stuff. But, making it through gatherings of old friends, family, and ritualized celebration does a couple things for me.
First, it makes me tell my own story to a bunch of different people that I don’t normally spend time with. These people don’t speak the same language as my sub-culture, so I have to translate. I have to choose what is important to say, what is worth compromising, and what is simply not going to get through. It’s hard to distill one’s experience for another, but infinitely harder to do it for someone who thinks they already know everything about you.
And in some ways, they do. Family and old friends know where you’ve come from more than anyone else might. But for many, in the confines of a holiday gathering, they seem stuck in the patterns, enmeshed with the traditions, and unwilling to listen deeply. That’s a two-way street, by the way, but this pattern seems to be true for most people I have talked to about it.
So by the time New Years comes around, I’ve had lots of time rattling around in my own head. “Why did I say that? Why did I do that? Why am I upset by that person? Why are things this way?” Naturally, grief follows, and its stages. The end of those stages, of Cyclical Holiday Grief, is Resolve. I’ve arrived at resolve.
I guess it’s time to make some Resolutions.
My resolutions this year are rooted in the layers of my Fate, that with which I came into this conscious, self-aware existence. They are the products of self-protective responses to dangerous or uncomfortable situations. They are addictions, and they do not serve me any longer. I honor them for the service they’ve rendered, and I release them. I don’t do this in word only, but in a daily process of sifting through my actions and experiences for further understanding. I do not do this alone, but with the powerful mirror of my partner, of self-reflective friends, and with the guidance of those bearing wisdom collected from human history and saved, protected from the modern dismissal of righteous, wild aliveness.
I let go of toxic sexuality, of pathological objectification without discernment or heart. I call in a deep honoring of my own sexuality and its expression in my body.
I let go of the belief that I need anything other than what I have to make the art that I need. I acknowledge and appreciate the appropriate tool for the task, and let go of time lost wishing for that which is not necessary.
I let go of pathological, addictive, technological self-soothing. Screen addiction and endless scrolling are expressions of deeper needs unmet, and I call in action that serves those needs.
All of these behaviors are expressions of deeper needs unmet, and with the support of others, with the belief that these behaviors do not make me evil, that I am worthy of such effort, that I am whole and I am becoming, I dig to the roots to feed that soil, to plant the seeds of that which I believe my life deserves.
And so it is.
Animas River Valley, Colorado
January 2, 2019
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