Hi again,
Today’s post is the final one based on Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals. These thoughts are, like from Saturday, some of my comments on specific ideas I liked from the book.
Living requires teaching and speaking the things we know beyond our own understanding.
Take this one literally at your own risk, reader. However, dismiss it at your own risk as well – those unable to work well with what they do not fully understand cannot live beyond the borders of their defined world.
I think this applies not just to ideas but also to other people. It’s worth regularly asking how we interact with people we don’t understand yet know something about. Do we interact with them based on terms we understand – what they do, who they know, where they’ve been, and so on? Or do we interact with a fresh perspective, hang in there when our obvious differences make us a little uncomfortable, and trust our intuition, instinct, and shared humanity to guide us forward?
Our biggest fears manifest when we take steps to avoid engaging with others on terms of difference or mortality.
As I pointed out above – there are some things we know beyond our own understanding. For me, this is one of them. I can’t quite explain this statement but I know it’s very important.
The key word might be manifest – by focusing on shared characteristics or refusing to interact over topics of mortality, we bring about the very things we fear most.
The genius brings his or her whole self to whatever is going on at the time.
This fits nicely into a definition of creativity I’ve highlighted in the past on TOA – creativity means finding hidden connections and associations among unrelated things. Genius defined in this way is a form of creativity on the personal level. Anyone who brings the whole self to a given moment has found a way to relate parts of the self that others might consider unrelated.
As it relates to those earlier ideas, this thought suggests a creative genius in a social setting is someone capable of forging connections with anybody.
The price to pay for identifying yourself with authority is self-examination and self-disclosure.
This sounds about right to me. Even within this self-protected bubble of TOA, I sometimes feel the price is pretty steep.
A person who discloses without self-examination has plenty of identity but very little authority. This type of person might have a lot of experience to share, for example, and we can come to view such a person in the context of those experiences – a person is a traveler, a professor, an importer/exporter, or whatever – but a person who does these things would really need to do a lot of it to become an authority on the matter. It is also hard to say such a person can be understood through these experiences. What do we learn about anyone based solely on all the things they’ve done?
This person could eventually develop authority through rigorous study or significant experience. A PhD in any field or a decorated career professional has the kind of authority that comes to mind when we use the term. Again, though, there is something incomplete without the self-examination. When retirement age arrives, the basis of the authority goes with it. The benefit of building up authority through self-examination is that the self is ever, and forever, present.
Self-examination without disclosure results in a lot of authority with a lack of identity. Others often find these people surprising. At best, they might be described as eccentric or even unconventional. At worst, the description tends to include a form of the word ‘rebellion’. The root cause of the problem is the same in both the best and worst cases – since nobody ever gets to know the person in question, everybody feels free to jump to their own conclusions.
The distortion that results from too much introspection without the balance of disclosure is a lot like the convinced referee who doesn’t quite understand the sport – the whistle gets blown a lot but nobody can explain why the referee is so sure about the call. The answer to the question is somewhat obvious – just have the referee explain the sport – but when the game is underway there isn’t much time for such disclosure.
