Be, Do, Have

It's a line from the Ehrhard Seminars Training. One of those koans or mantras that were used to get you at how you organized your life. Came up in a conversation with one of my reader friends that started out with an interesting observation he made that while he seemed to organize his career around "line" roles where he was actually "doing" something that produced specific results, I seemed to organize mine around helping others to "do" by "being" an aide or support or mirror or in a way the king's fool who would say the things that needed saying that were not being said.

Think "King Lear" in the wilderness with his Fool if you will. (Although now, truth once again, I think I feel a little more like Lear than the Fool.)

Where did this "being" way of living and working come from? What led me to make the choices I made for work? And for that matter, life?

The Fool is a dangerous occupation. There isn't much certainty in it. If you stray too far into confrontive truths you can get killed, yet if you do not push the envelope you aren't doing your job of holding the merciless mirror up to yourself or others. It is an arete with selling out on the one side and getting dispatched on the other. Neither are good outcomes.

Growing up in an alcoholic home is like that. Finding the way to be your own person amid the chaos is like being on the knife edge between capitulating to victimhood or resorting to outright rebellion or destructive violence. How can you stay there, centered on that fine line, and realize a sense of self? I think the answer is you can't quite without a long effort that is mostly inwardly focused, yet with the odd outward element of trying to keep things in balance and to make them work. Maybe in the "what is my act" terms, the injunction is "never be a victim."

The irony is that you so often find yourself being what it is that you are trying so hard to avoid being.

One of my wife's favorite songs is Linda Ronstadt's "When Will I Be Loved?" (Not an accident that we found this durable relationship we have with each other.) Ronstadt sings it like an anthem. "I've been cheated. I've been lied to. When will I be loved?" BTW, my wife also likes Ronstadt's "Feels Like Home."

So maybe part of the current struggle is that without having a place to do my "being" of being a help and aide and confidant, I'm feeling a little lost. Could be that this blog is one way I am creating a space to "be."