Learning to act right (36)… When we need someone to do it for us!!

Torrey Orton

July 28, 2013

“He’ll have the bubbly red, too”

 

The other day I was out for a lunch bite with Mike. When he’s lunching at the University Café he takes a glass of bubbly red with it. I seldom drink midday, midweek unless on the road as in the Brasserie du Commerce in Besancon two months ago. This time, however, I was free after lunch so I started contemplating a glass myself and got hung up between a house shiraz and the aforesaid bubbly red, which I did not know other than by the repute his use of it lent. The waiter was standing there and I was uhming and awing.

 

My decision was all that stood between us and lunch starting its trip from the kitchen and I couldn’t make it. I was stuck in the roundabout of indeterminable differences between the options, pedalling and still.

 

“He’ll have the bubbly red, too”…

 

… Mike said and I settled in relief, as did the waiter. A classic of the situation where any decision is OK, if someone would just make one. I so much needed help at the moment that I didn’t know it until he provided it decisively. Either would be good for me if I could make the move. Thanks to Mike I was moved. It was an ethically vacuous event, but clear in its agency. I submitted to the push of his action, and needed to do so if the rest of the event was to unfold.

 

It occurred to me at the time that this was also a major purpose of close relationships – to share the decision load of life as much as the consequential work. And sharing is sometimes to pick up the bundle unasked…which requires a slightly daring arrogation of rights to oneself in the interest of preserving the participation of the other in the shared load!!!

 

There are two things in joint decision making (which seldom means both coming to the same conclusion simultaneously). It must be right in content and in process: we have to come to decisions in acceptable ways - consultatively, considerately, flexibly…and, we have to make the right decision for the task in question. The process is more important than the product since specific decisions can often be changed modified, adapted (usually do if they are substantive ones) and that requires effective consultation. These are mostly engineering problems, problems of having right tools and flexible application rules. The decision, however, is pure art - intuitive, scatty, quick – in need of a spark and failing the internal one, an outer will do fine. Someone has to move, and a hand is sometimes required.

 

Let’s run that by again in story form

 

Two months ago now I had been stuck in a decision muddle for weeks about taking a week to go to the US for a family reunion, or not to. I really was stuck in thinking which was dangling in the branches of multiple considerations of sentiment and logistics until I visited a now dead friend, Barry, who was clearly on the way to dying in his own mind at the time. I stopped by the palliative care place he had recently been consigned to and shared my small concern. “Do it”, he said almost before I got my considerations shaped up for him. His own brother, long separated, somewhat estranged, had just been down from another state to see him and they had talked for the first time in years. He was clear about the relationship priorities of late life. I could feel my mind slip over a cog as he spoke and walked out with uncluttered resolve to go (which I will be doing in two weeks).

 

 

Appreciations (5) …my patient clients

Appreciations (5) …my patient clients

Torrey Orton
June 9, 2009

I realised the other day that I am seriously thankful for the therapy clients who come my way…who put themselves hopefully in my hands for a bit on their presently stumbling way to their clearer ends. It is an act of faith/hope by them to do so - either a renewal of it for those who have been in the chair before, or a first finding of it for beginners. Just to make the step is already to be well on the way to a better life. But, it involves a kind of submission. So, I am repeatedly thankful for their forbearance with my stumbling efforts towards them, which often call into question my confidence in the help I offer.

The trying that’s required to make that first effort and then, to our surprise often, to continue as the pathway becomes more cloudy and obstructed by the discoveries of exploration is the most impressive wonder of the work. And sustaining the fine balance between the motivation of fear and hope is the most trying task.

Some of these come by personal referral. Those whose willingness I enjoy the most are those assigned to me by the intake therapist at a psych shop where I consult part-time. They have no prior knowledge of me to help them through the initial period of blind faith required to get confident enough to focus wholly on themselves and little on me.

The intake therapist of course sings my praises as especially appropriate to the client’s needs, experience, etc. Many, however, including the personally referred, have questionable prior experiences of therapists as a part of the history they bring into my rooms. Another bunch of new clients are really new to therapy and somewhat wondrous both as to what will happen and whether they really need to be there anyway (Am I sick, crazy, etc.?) or have any hope of really getting over whatever it is that afflicts them.

Both of these concerns are lively and seemingly interfere with the work. In another frame, dealing with them is the work and signals the key challenges both for our relationship (what does happen here) and their self-understanding as ‘sick’ or not. Current mental health practices and marketing have increased awareness of problems and the likelihood people will act on them by seeking help. They also magnify the sense that every glitch of the spirit or twist of a relationship is a sign of potential for a few days (or a lifetime) in a psycho lockup or on meds.

So, helping them decide how ‘sick’ they are is a core task, but not always clear on the surface, nor easily resolved. A turning point seems to be admitting that their ‘sickness’ is a lifetime condition which can also be called a personal history…. a subject we all have in our repertoires and which we work to shape in desirable ways and directions, though not always with the help of the fates.

In this context – a relationship which is solely about them and about their most vulnerable parts – the energy and commitment to self which clients display and deploy is a daily joy for me and, eventually, for them. It is a place where I experience the good will of people towards themselves and their important others (even the most hated).

I am discovering as my case load increases that I can draw on their efforts for examples to enlighten others who often wonder if it is only them who have this or that problem. While there is a broad potential community of the troubled, it is not easy to find. You can’t just carry a placard in the street advertising your desire to meet fellow troubled travellers. There are lots of web sites – virtual communities – but they haven’t the same impact as a living face and voice.

Appreciations (2) …Learning aikido by submitting to mastery

Appreciations (2) …Learning aikido by submitting to mastery
Torrey Orton
May 14, 2009

This is less an appreciation than an appreciating – a developmental, making process rather than a summary or aesthetically contemplative one. For I have certainly not mastered aikido or even a small part of it, though I have passed my first grading 6+ months ago. And I continue after two years to find little, and sometimes big, refinements or completions of the practices which have required an unconscious transition to a different mental space to even notice that they were possible.

Submission and learning:

One of the key learning steps is being willing to learn. This means, in part, submitting myself to someone else’s expertise, superiority, good intentions. Recently I was telling people I met at a lunch about my aikido commitment and volunteered that one aspect of interest to me after 9 months practice was consciously submitting myself to another’s leadership. One of the listeners blurted: “I couldn’t do that”. Therein probably lies a story of self-entrapment in the folds of self-protection, but...

Repeatedly, I remind myself to just do what Sensei is doing each day and everything will come together. Of special concern is remembering the order of practices which partly controls access to the inner contents of each one. It has become apparent that consciously struggling for the order – making notes, or similar – does not work for me. Or, rather, that just going along brings everything around again and again, so struggle for control is unnecessary. The video of Sensei’s Sensei demonstrating the 21 jo suburi practices helps. I don’t often use it now, though it’s on my laptop desktop and easily playable anytime I’m home (or away).

At the end of the morning meditation routine (which is the entry to the jo work each day), Sensei bows to the aikido school’s founder whose picture is hung on a wall with ceremonial incense burning on a table to one side. This ritual, too, I am not yet committed to after 8 months of participating in the meditation (which was not a part of my initial training, though I had experience with it intensively 30 years ago). I’m aware of resisting this last (?) submission (is it really the last one?) , while realising as I write that submission is a means of honouring the authority, expertise, etc. of the Sensei and his submission to the authority, expertise of his Sensei, and so on. ... a way of respecting the price in submission to the discipline of the school that they paid to become good enough for us to learn from them.

I am also aware that displaying this submission before other students, including my wife, is embarrassing in some way I don’t yet grasp. I undertook one morning when only I and Sensei were training to try getting on my knees at the close of the mediation ritual acknowledgment of the dojo’s founders in Japan, but couldn’t kneel the hardwood floor...so back to my chair.

Submission as offer and undertaking

It seems that submission goes in two different but mutually dependent directions: it’s two common meanings are (a) offer or propose, as in submit a report or an application or a rendition of the jo suburi under the eye of the Sensei (or, precisely, for the eye of the Sensei); this I did to pass my first grading. And, the second is (b) undertaking for another, as in submit to their command, direction, etc.(which I do in every training whether in group or alone).

So, when I take up aikido I both undertake the command of the Sensei and offer myself to him, or put myself in his hands. This is probably the source of the authority which allows me to follow his lead even when it is ‘wrong’ – that is, when he departs from routines, styles, orders of activity which previously had been the behavioural foundation of the discipline. And which made it learnable to a large extent in the initial phases where the performance models were not enough in mind to be accessed quickly and fluently.

Inhibitions to submission

Finally, for the moment, what inhibits submission? What makes “I couldn’t do that” a likely response from some people which also expresses part of me in resistance, like them!? In myself I find that resistance to a fully compliant submission I mentioned earlier – to honouring the elders who are the origin of the aikido I study. At the aesthetic level, it involves moves I’d feel somewhat silly to be seen doing. At another, ethnic perhaps, the manner of honouring is very non-Anglo.

In any event, I can say that part of me is under-developed (or over-developed looked at from another perspective). Perhaps it’s that I would feel shrunken in some respect by participating?? That’s what just came to mind and I’ve learned to follow the tracks of things which come to mind since that’s the only access to the subconscious I carry with me all day every day. But, on noticing that, I also notice that what I may be resisting is the submission to an imperfect god, for the practices continue to change in their home place as much as in the variations of my Sensei here – as they must.

So, what am I submitting to exactly – a discipline which is definite but changeable, which is demanding but relaxed, which is paradoxical to some extent? An effort for perfect form which realises that it can never be achieved...there is only the trying. A parallel universe to everyday life.

At various times each of these three has been my Sensei, but these Sensei’s Sensei is the man in the middle. They are, from l to r: Sean Seibold, Simon Harris, John Rigopoulos in Japan in late 2008.