Recalibration

Over the past several months, much of my writing has explored uncertainty—how to live within it, how not to become captured by polarization, and how to resist the pressure to immediately choose one side or another.

Lately, however, I have begun to realize that I am not so much trying to avoid taking sides as I am trying to become clearer about the place from which I stand.

A little over a week ago, I joined seventy men at a Mankind Project Elder Retreat in Oregon’s Cascade Mountains. On the last day of the retreat, one of the men in my small group reflected that I seemed to be going through a period of “recalibration.” The word stayed with me.

At this stage of my life, I do feel something is being recalibrated. Perhaps even transformed.

Most of my life, I have been concerned about what others think of me. I wrote a substantial amount throughout the 1990s—often three or four hours a day—but rarely shared it. I worried too much about how it might be received.

Over the past year, I have been exploring what it might mean to live a more authentic life. Part of that inquiry has required me to look at my desire to be nice. There is nothing wrong with kindness. But I’ve recognized for some time that trying to be nice, especially when it means avoiding disagreement or seeking approval, can get in the way of living authentically. At times, it has even contributed to passive-aggressive behavior.

Writing has become something of a mirror for me.

I write to discover what I think, what I feel, what I am questioning, and perhaps what I am becoming. Increasingly, I have allowed my appreciation of the writing process to lead the way and have let go of whether others will like what I have to share. I’m not looking for agreement.

But there is another part of this recalibration that I am only beginning to understand.

Perhaps I have spent enough time looking at myself.
The purpose of becoming clearer about who I am and where I stand cannot simply be greater self-understanding. It must eventually turn outward—toward other people, toward community, and toward the world we share.

I want to be more able to step out of my own preoccupations and enter the world of the other—to listen, to see, to encounter another person without immediately filtering that person through my assumptions.

And perhaps to recognize more deeply that there really is no completely separate “other.” My well-being is bound up with the well-being of the people around me, my community, the larger human family, and the natural world we inhabit.

So the question is changing.

It is no longer only:

From what center do I want the next part of my life and work to emerge?

It is also:

How do I live from that center in a way that serves life beyond myself?

I do not have a finished answer. But something is becoming clearer.

I will live from a deeper respect for the dignity and possibility of life—to see clearly, remain open to inquiry, stand courageously where conscience asks me to stand, and create spaces in which others may become more able to see and live from their own deepest humanity.

For me, this does not mean certainty.

It means inquiry with commitment.

Human dignity is worth standing for. Compassion is worth standing for. Truth matters. How we treat one another matters. And how we treat the earth upon which we stand matters.

And perhaps becoming more fully ourselves ultimately asks us to become less preoccupied with ourselves.

To look outward.

Listen.

See.

And enter more fully into the world we share.

For now, “recalibration” still feels like a good word for where I am.