Listen to thisI have been giving a lot of thought to the question of climate change. Or perhaps I might better say that I have been spinning in worried circles about what looks to me to be a headlong rush into climate catastrophe. I say spinning in circles because I really don’t feel as though anything I can do will shift the implacable logic of greed and gluttony that is pushing us closer and closer to the edge of a radically altered world that will be increasingly difficult to navigate. And really, even that phrasing of the issue as though it was simply a question of difficulty obfuscates a deeper existential panic—a kind of whistling past the graveyard.
The phrase whistling past the graveyard fits for me in this context in several ways. Dead people are in the cemetery, and I am alive walking past. The dead and I have nothing in common—they are in there and I am out here. But death makes me nervous and so I whistle as though nothing is bothering me while in fact, I am terrified of dying and joining those on the other side of the cemetery walls. Climate catastrophe is often like that for me. I do not want myself or my species to join the ranks of extinction growing exponentially day by day.
And so, I whistle past the actuality of the horrors we are perpetuating across the landscape of all that gives us life. I want to note in passing the fact that fewer and fewer of us still whistle in the literal sense. When I was growing up many people whistled both casually while going about their business and intentionally to show off their prowess as extraordinary whistlers. Whistling was a common occurrence. We have lost that along with the full body belly laugh. We still laugh, but it is with less and less force. In fact. I would argue that the ecology of joy that is made of a myriad small acts such as spontaneous singing, whistling, and full body laughing is under threat from the same social forces that are decimating ecologies of plants and animals. All of which is to say that the current planetary crisis is fully on my mind and at the same time pushed to the edges of my consciousness by a fervent need to deny its force.
That said, I was thinking about ways in which we might live differently to shift the odds in the favor of living things versus the juggernaut of capitalist appropriation and commodification and the phrase “to live lightly” on the planet cane to mind. Of course, in the context of ecological relations, to live lightly means to take as little as possible from our environment and to make as little mark as one can in living day to day. This is indeed sage advice and extremely difficult to manage for most of us embedded as we are in a world of high consumer culture. For myself, I feel as though my way of life is often a wrecking ball smashing through the sets of all my living relations and I am reasonably conscious of what I am doing. Nonetheless, I am committed to learning more about living lightly in my relations with the living world that comprises my life support. It isn’t easy and I probably won’t be anywhere near as successful as I would like, but it is worth the effort to do less harm.
As I was reflecting on this, I began to wonder about the implications of living lightly for other sets of relations. I started to wonder what it would mean to live lightly in the work of relational care. When we engage in caring for others, how might we utilize a light touch; a touch that would at a minimum do no harm. What degree of intensity is too much, what degree of invasiveness, what degree of discipline, what degree of assumption, what degree of indifference-at what level are we too heavy handed, too clumsy, too forceful. How are we to learn to be light in our touch with those we engage in the work. Can we be sensitized sufficiently so as to know when our interactions are bruising and damaging the filaments of desire that produce the capacity for creativity and action. Because each of us is composed of an almost infinite network of delicate sensate organs that range from subatomic particles to atoms, molecules, cells, skin, eyes, and hands to name but a few. Each of these is delicately calibrated within a complex ecology that engages all relations with all elements that come together to compose the lived experience of the minutiae of the moment. When they are treated with care, our ability to live fully as the sensate beings we are, is amplified and our life world is rich and full. When our sensory capacities are treated carelessly or with a certain violence, our life is diminished and our relational world shrinks. We can even come to a place where we shrink from experience and desire less of life. In a word we die a little or sometimes even quite a lot.
To care for our experiential capacity calls for attentiveness, an ability to take a moment and open our receptive consciousness to the richness of the moment. It takes the ability to pause in what the Taoists would call Wu Wei or action that is non action. To those of us raised in the western tradition of directed causal action, Wu Wei seems paradoxical or even nonsensical. How can an action be non-action? Surely to act is to direct the force of ourselves into the world in a way that changes things according to our intention. For many of us in CYC this is how we see our work with young people or even how we train ourselves to engage the work. We spend many hours and days trying out different courses of action to see their effects and to modify those actions if we do not get the desired result.
Wu Wei on the other hand suggests that the world is already in motion, not because all of the compositional elements are intentionally deciding what to do, but because of the implacable logic of composition. Such logic is not premised in conscious decisions. Rather it is premised in the ways that elements of life either work in harmony together to promote living capacity or are toxic to one another in ways that promote the dissolution of coherent systems of living form. In other words, life is constantly composing and decomposing all of its elemental ecologies without having to intentionally do anything.
So much of our life is composed in this way. Our bodies are being composed and decomposed every minute, our neurology is composing and decomposing fields of perception and thought well outside our conscious awareness. We don’t think so much a thought thinks us. Our hair grows, our lungs breathe, our heart beats, our blood flows, chemicals flow in and out of us, atoms move through us, our skin recomposes itself over and over. And that is not even really to consider the immense field of autonomic change that is made up of all the bodies we encounter that randomly shape our biological, psychological, and emotional development over the duration of a moment or a lifetime.
However, depending on how we come to consciousness as part of our socio-cultural shaping, we can come to believe that we are in charge of all of this. That we make all of this happen. That we can shape ourselves and the world through directed and sometimes forceful, action. We can make our heartbeat better, our organs survive longer, our hair healthier, our muscles stronger, our neurology richer and so on. We can spend much of lives engaged in these projects as though we were fully in charge. And without a doubt we will see changes and sometimes the changes we see will make us feel effective and powerful.
But from the perspective of Wu Wei this is largely wasted energy that actually expends our life force and diminishes our capacity to live fully. To practice Wu Wei means to pause and see how life is already composing and decomposing itself. It is to open a field of perception that allows us to see the flows of life in which we are embedded and then immerse ourselves in a flow of composition that will enhance the unique compositional qualities that we bring to that moment. This requires a minimum of effort beyond learning to shape our conscious perception to be able to see where life is unfolding and then joining in the flow.
Perhaps another way to think of this is revisit Mark Krueger’s proposition that CYC work is a dance. From my perspective this was one of Mark’s key insights. The idea is that our relationships involve a rhythmic interaction that requires a kind of focused attentiveness to the other and their effects on us. To move together in a dance, that is a graceful and joyful expression of life, requires a delicate awareness of the innate flow of the bodies composing the dance in every micro interaction of bodies moving together across space and time. To dance well can never be the force of one body against the force of the other body. That will be a clumsy and mechanistic composition unpleasant to the dancers and anyone watching. Instead, dance as a celebration of life, moves effortlessly through a level of conscious awareness that leads to action as the result of non-action. A paying attention to the spaces between the motions to see what naturally comes next. To dance this way is to live lightly.
Krueger’s work is cited less these days than it used to be and perhaps it is because it is demanding of a level of attention to life and lived experience that is hard to find in the work of CYC in the 21st century. To see the work, as Kruger did, as a dance that enters the flow of living force is seldom part of the training provided by CYC programs or institutions. As a field we have become more and more enamored by how much we can know and do. How many frameworks we can apply to our work and how much work we can do that will make a difference. We like to be in charge of what happens and to be lauded for our good work. It seems to me that to practice dance or Wu Wei requires a large dose of humility often missing in our drive to be recognized professionals.
The organizations and programs where we work are too often top-down bureaucracies that impose structural violence on the delicate sets of relations that compose our field of work. That is not to say that good things don’t happen in our work despite this. But it is less joyous and life affirming than it could be if we were able to live lightly and dance more often. The Taoist sage Lao Tsu admonishes us that
Ruling a large country is like cooking a small fish
Using the Tao to manage the world
Its demons have no power
Not only do its demons have no power
Its gods do not harm people
Not only do its gods not harm people
The sages also do not harm people
They both do no harm to one another
So virtue merges and returns
To rule the large country of youth adult relations is like cooking a small fish. It requires delicacy and attentiveness, or the fish will fall apart or be overcooked. It takes a light touch. Using the Tao, which can be read as the natural rhythm of world to manage the world, eliminates the power of our demons personal and professional. The demons that haunt us and our work only have force because we continue to violate the natural rhythms of life and living force. Note that we can only use the Tao to manage things but not control them. To use the natural rhythm of the world also eliminates the hierarchical capacities of our Gods to harm people. In CYC we might see Gods as all those theories and ideas that come to govern our work, and blind is to those who are right in front of us. If we pay attention to the moment and the living engagement that is the gift of our work, then the force of the Gods will fade and we as the sages will no longer harm the people. In doing no harm, virtue merges and returns in the natural rhythm of life to come together and return over and over in the dance of life. So lets dance!
