Making sense of the space between

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

These are the words of Vaclav Havel, still inviting us to consider what it is to ‘make sense’.

Our skills of sense-making, our sensitivity, our creative attunement, are deeply needed in all aspects of our interconnected lives these days. Children sometimes exhibit these abilities better than those of us who have successfully, conscientiously and sadly adjusted to a less sensitive, less painful mode; those of us who have, by accident or design, dulled our senses. Yet, on balance, we have education systems that are struggling to prepare children and young people even for our current circumstances. There’s some kind of idea that the children, and the future, can be fixed.  Some requirement for our children also to be dulled, to stop reminding us what we have become.

So, if you are an elder, or perhaps simply ‘older’, how could your influence better serve the ones who follow? 

 

As William James said, ‘Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.’ For me, a here-and-now conversation that crosses generations might be helpful, so that whatever wisdom the elders have mustered can be re-crafted in relationship with the wisdom of youth.  This is not the same as just the elders having their say, or just the youth. It is what can happen at that precious, intricate place that we call a frontier – a frontier between the known and the not-yet-known. The foundational place of the poetic.

But to do this we all need to invite and not impose. We need to imaginatively give up on any details we imagined.  Our praxis can't dictate terms for others.

 If you will be disappointed by the lack of an outcome that was never in your gift, however needed and sane it seems in our troubled times, then you may need to hope in a different way.

 

So, my resolutions for 2018: to travel in that different hope, learning to speak and to live more poetically.

And bombs fall and children die and people make art and cry and try though the whole of the thing seems so badly awry and we stand in between what we know and we don’t and we just have to stand though it sticks in the throat and we still have to stand, stand through hope to no hope then stand on again, find a way, more than cope.  

But it’s not that we’re sad. More bemused by the joke that we still haven’t got what it takes to not croak. And you’ve got to admit that there’s joy to be had in the smallest of gestures: it’s really not mad to laugh for a reason no others can see, to be what the moment just asks you to be. To do this because humankind can be kind.

This is how it is in a liminal time.

© Julie S Allan January 2018

With acknowledgement to pioneers of the human spirit, awareness, connectedness and creativity including Nora Bateson, Margaret Wheatley, David Whyte, Philip Pullman and Sir Ken Robinson for words along the way.  I don’t claim to represent their views.