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What we will point ourselves towards this year? Will it be dignifying, for us, our lives, the lives of those around us? Will it be generous, heartfelt, courageous, compassionate, kind, creative, patient, principled, inclusive, daring, fierce, loving, joyful, grateful, truthful or some other set of life-giving qualities? Or will we just take up the projects and commitments we’ve been handed by those around us, by our social media feeds, by advertising, by the current political discourse, by habit?

This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted as always by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace.  Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify.

Here's our source for this week:

Gardening Ourselves Awake Again

“If you were to be able to ask a bee, or an ant, ‘for the sake of what are you going about your business?’, and if they were able to respond in a way you could understand, my guess is that you’d hear an answer that would be striking in its consistency. “It’s my role to take care of the hive”, one might say. “I search for food”, might say another. And even if the kind of bee you were able to talk to had multiple roles, they’d be very circumscribed. Queen Bees don’t do the foraging. Worker bees don’t lay the eggs. No bees build computer software or become lawyers or compose orchestral symphonies. It’s not that the world of the bee is shallow or meaningless, or that it’s without purpose. It’s just that the range of ways of being - the range of purposes - available to a bee are strongly shaped by the bee’s physiology. The being with the body of the bee, with its particular kind of nervous system and musculature, occupies a very specific and wondrous and circumscribed set of purposes in the web of living communities of which it is a part.

We humans are, of course, subject to many of the same constraints, the ones that come from our lives being supported by physical bodies with musculature, organs and nervous systems. But, at the same time, we are radically different in that our nervous systems support an extraordinary kind of openness to possibility. We *can* decide to create new possibilities - we can learn to make software, or be an artist, raise a family - or not, pursue a craft, or a fortune, or fame, or love, point our lives towards being a teacher, an astronaut, a plumber, a pickpocket, a politician, a cinema attendant, a tuba player, a clown. We - because of the way we invent shared artifacts, objects, processes and practices, because of the way we use language and generate interpretations which we can make explicit to one another, and because of the way we build a vast web of shared meanings, culture and tools that exist between us rather than ‘in’ us - are the kinds of beings who can point ourselves towards a huge array of possibilities, purposes and intentions. In that way we are very unlike bees, or ants, or foxes, whose bodies and interactions are ‘built in’ in a way quite unlike ours.

We are the ones who can build societies that include, or exclude. We are the ones who can take care and steward, who can extract and abuse, who can point ourselves towards the needs of those who will come after us or who take care only of our own immediate gratification. We are the ones who can do this consciously, by declaration in language, or unconsciously, by following the grooves of habit laid down by the lives we’ve lived so far or the possibilities that were handed to us by others.
And that’s another defining characteristic of us humans as we ‘press possibilities into being’ through our way of living. We can do so intentionally, declaratively, in response to the question ‘for the sake of what am I doing whatever I’m doing?’. And we can also do so habitually, routinely, unreflectively, automatically - as if we’re on an autopilot whose direction was set long ago.

There’s no doubt that it can feel easier to live on the automatic-pilot option, especially when we’re afraid, or overwhelmed, and when we’re surrounded by a culture which provides us with so many ways to distract ourselves or numb ourselves to the vibrancy of life that’s always within us and among us. But it may be one of the great human dignities, and what makes us most human, that we are the ones who can choose, if we wish. We can’t always choose our circumstances, and we can’t always choose the actions or professions or possessions we would like to have, but we can choose with an enormous amount of creativity ‘that which our life is pointed towards’, or, in other words, the ultimate ‘for-the-sake-of-which’ which guides how we do whatever it is we are able to do.

So, what we will point ourselves towards this year? Will it be dignifying, for us, our lives, the lives of those around us? Will it be generous, heartfelt, courageous, compassionate, kind, creative, patient, principled, inclusive, daring, fierce, loving, joyful, grateful, truthful or some other set of life-giving qualities? Or will we just take up the ‘for-the-sakes-of-which’ we’ve been handed by those around us, by our social media feeds, by advertising, by the current political discourse, by habit?

Justin Wise

Photo by Mike Erskine on Unsplash