a bedtime story

I'm feeling bruised by an encounter today. So bruised that I've been awake since 3am. My mind has been whirring away trying to apply some tlc to the black and blue inside. And this post is the noise being emitted from that dodgy computer fan as it has been trying to cool my head down in these early hours.

Okay, Rupesh. So what happened?

Wellll...

I had been preparing some work for a few days. In my head it was a reasonable important thing. Anyway, I was supposed to get some feedback on it today. I certainly got the feedback and it felt the ususal sliced white sandwich feedback.....you know a meaty bit of bad surrounded two slices of white which just seemed to be there to highlight the importance of the stuff in the middle.

After hearing these thoughts about my work, I left feeling hurt and bruised. I felt like a victim of someone else's dealings. I started wondering why that person didn't seem to care, didn't even seem to recognise that I might be not feeling that great.

On the one hand I could not quite imagine this person really being this great ogre that I was picturing her as. And yet, on the other hand, my experience of being affected by this, of being hurt and injured was pretty real. The whole afternoon, I had been walking around a bit like a teary child who was ready to fall into a boxing rage having been sent to the naughty corner.

Early this morning I woke up with a few aches and started wondering about this. How was it that this person had not seen the hurt that I was going through? And how is it that people in power always seem to be oblivious to the hurt they cause other people? Surely there was a time when they didn't have power and got hurt. How can people forget this?

I got to thinking about some stuff that I had been reading about language and communication recently (in fact the same stuff I had been reading in preparation for the work).

One of the writers I had been reading is a guy called Lakoff. He talks about the powerful role of metaphor in our language and how our lives can end up being influenced by them. For example, if we talk about sending a message to hit a target, then we're setting up our communcation to be defined by this underlying image of some kind of battle between opposing forces. He suggests that this is not just a nice parallel, but that the metaphors we use end up actually organising us, our families, organisations, schools etc. They influence what we think is good, and right and correct. In a booklet (written in XXX) addressed to American progressives, he suggests that the conservatives have successfully used some ways of talking to inspire people to believe in their values. He goes on to talk about the power of certain types of story, which seem to exist in the American culture. Most of these stories, he suggests, are defined by the having three important elements - a victim, an aggressor and a hero.

(I think this is a line of thinking that can be linked to the work of the cultural anthropologist, Joseph Campbell, who proposed that there were some seven major types of stories that can be seen human cultures traced across both time and geography.)

Back to my experiences today. There I was merely trying to do my best for the organisation, indeed thinking that I had something substantial to offer, when along came someone who just put out the flame, and then shot me down for good measure. After all of this had happened, I had come home on the train thinking simply how nice it would have been to have someone to hug.

So, there we have it - the myth in real time, right. Me the victim of someone else's nasty oppression, with the dream of a loved one to be my hero.

But as I was going over this in my head this morning, I started wondering whether perhaps the aggressor in my story was simply that or whether something more complex was going on. I mean was it possible that she was as uncaring as this role required her to be.

The story about her and I...aggressor and victim is quite helpful in one way. That way I get to be right, loving and complex and she gets to be...well, it doesn't matter that much - aggressor. End of.

But is it not possible that she was perhaps also a victim - perhaps not in that situation but sometime somewhere else. I argued with myself for a while on this one...she's got more power, so she should be more conscious. I would have been much more caring towards the other person if I had been in her position. I thought to myself that I would remember this lesson and when I was in a similar situation I would make sure that the other person didn't feel that way.

But wait on there just one second partner. Is it really possible that she's there to hurt me. That all the times I get hurt, someone on the other side is a bit of an aggressor who's fighting me. The numbers just don't seem to add up. If half of us get hurt once, then that makes the other half aggressors right. But everyone seems to have been the victim of someone else at some point. So where are these pure evil doers who never get hurt by some else?

Suddenly, I realised that I'm trapped by the story. That the only way I was looking at the situation was through this set of characters. Quickly, I started going through other possible stories. But it was hard. They all seemed to require this victim, hero and aggressor story.

What other stories are there?

Well, to me there seem to be a couple of potential other ones out there. In my head these sound a bit balmy, so I'm not sure what's going to happen when I put them down on paper...but lets see what happens.

One of the oldest stories is that we're just all going somewhere. I mean, its the journey of the traveller. It implies that we're not static, that we're not just sitting here as fully formed statues but that we that we are work in progress all the time going somewhere a bit unknown, but going somewhere. Some would say that we are more verbs than nouns...less human beings and more "human becomings". You might also think about that in wider circles - families, cultures and societies, ecosystems and universes. They are just all becomings.

I'm quite attracted to this idea at 4.30 in the morning. It means that I'm giving some sense of possibility back to the nasty ogre...and also freeing myself up from having to always be in the fight or flight mode. I think this is the reason why sometimes people talk about such and such being a teaching. My aggressor today was not so much an aggressor, but she was instead a teaching. And perhaps for her I was also a teaching.

Another one works with the image of a poet or dancer. Its quite similar to the becoming story - about composing something, perhaps improvising with what you have and what is around you, drawing inspiration from this and then expressing with creativity and not knowing. An extension to this story is a group of dancers, collectively improvising something out together.

And perhaps bringing these together - the becoming, the poet and the group...perhaps another story is about a circus of travelling bards.

Right, I think I'm getting a little sleepy now. I guess my last thought on this right now is how pervasive and easy that fight story is - the one with the victim, hero and all. I'm not sure that sometimes its not actually quite helpful. But, it also seems to me to have to much of a grip on my imagination sometimes. I think for now, I'm just going to try and notice where it crops up in my head or in my language...and perhaps occasionally, I'll tell myself another story to drift off to sleep. Night night.