In Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake wrote, “…all life-forms are in fact processes not things. The “you “ of five years ago was made from different stuff than the “you “ of today.”
This brings to mind one of my favorite psychologists, Robert Kegan, who’s theory about adult development suggests that there is an ultimate stage of development in which we understand that we are not fixed; that we play roles with other people in the context of their own roles.
Kegan wrote another book, which would really be more at home amongst other business books like the classic Good to Great, or Blue Ocean Strategy. In “Immunity to Change” Kagan takes this notion of adult development and writes about the things that impede us from changing despite our resolutions. Some flukes in our identity keep us from having to face other bits, and thus in some form or another, keep us from even greater demons.
In those cases, we’re less of Sheldrake’s processes, and more of a fixed notion, at least until the final D catches up with us and we become one again with the dust of ages. Perhaps then, we might spend some of our time being an object, and other parts of our time being a process. Perhaps, it’s a choice we each face every day – to embrace being an unfixed thing – or to assume all the elements of our identity, fixed in place.
In drawing, particularly with charcoal or pastels, we use a horrific blend of chemicals in a spray can called fixative. The idea is that the stuff keeps the particles of the drawing from being changed, or with certain Ultraviolet filters, from fading. Of course, all matter is forever unfixed – and whether your paintings and drawings crumble by next spring, or in 2,000 years doesn’t really concern the sedimentary rocks established over 300,000 years ago. All of these things of ours will become part of the earth again. Even dinosaur fossils are for the most part not the bones themselves, but bones that have been replaced with minerals, only holding the original form of the prototype.
How can we cultivate being more in process and less of a thing? I would say by “allowing” it. In allowing, we don’t attempt to impede the rich messages of the world around us by our own fixed ideas of what things are saying. When asked how he made his characters have such voices, the playwright August Wilson protested that he did not make them have voices, he allowed them to have voices. Michelangelo had a similar idea about uncovering the figures that were already existent in the stone, while his contemporary da Vinci exhorted artists to find the images in the water stains on the wall.
There are many tools available to us, like Word of the Day, the Tarot, the iChing, and more. The hallmark of these tools is they present us with a structured set of archetypal information or even seemingly random notions – and our brains magically stitch these things into relevant patterns. It’s as though someone living across the hall came over and knocked on the door, and gave us the treasure map for the box of gems hidden in your own backyard.
Preceding the passage quoted in the beginning, Sheldrake wrote, “You can think of your life like this. The growing tip is the present moment — your lived experience of now — which gnaws into the future as it advances. The history of your life is the rest of the hypha, the blue lines that you’ve left in a tangled trail behind you. A mycelial network is a map of a fungus’s recent history…”
Your life is your map!