Moderation – Week 4
Where I reflect on various aspects of humility, through the risks of success, keeping a garden, embodiment and collective sense-making processes.
As the year progresses, weeks devoted to different virtues start to blur and bleed. Legacy of courage week, I have a tradie come home for long-delayed repair works. I put an alarm earlier than I like to. My usual freedom of movement is limited. I have to stay nearby on call, for whenever they finish. I compensate by indulging in too many rounds of a new game I’m addicted to, and food. Cereal at home, muffin at a café, an egg tart on the way to the QV co-working space. Too many chips when a friend invites us to her place next door. Strong dark beer to celebrate, two days in a row. I’m doing something difficult, I deserve it!
For then the house is done. So is a large piece of writing I’d been stuck on for months, two difficult book chapters, direct result of committed ‘sitzfleisch’: sit on your butt and get it over with. I feel accomplished, and joyful. I want to celebrate by eating and indulging more. This would have been such a great courage week. But moderation, oooo, did I stumble here?
Success, I thought, challenges virtue ethics, tempting us to an utilitarian view. The joy I feel is a reaction to positive change in my world, which in itself is a result of good habits I adopted. The tradie came because I made a resolution to train courage, and do the things I tend to postpone, and actually acted on it. Same with the book chapters. Now comes success, and I can feel the lure of goal-orientation. Celebrate, review, learn, what next? No wonder I have a nagging fear of success: this is when positive habits are most likely to fall through.
I lean into an insight from a few weeks ago. I was listening to a course on a meditation app about positive psychology. The 24 strengths identified by Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi fit – or can be fitted – into six overarching categories, four of which correspond to the cardinal / Stoic virtues. I’ve been looking at those lists repeatedly since, tracking insights from previous engagements, and looking at various angles for this year’s practice. Moderation can take the form of self-control and caution, but also forgiveness and humility. I lean into the latter, to mitigate the risk of pride that I sense coming with even those minor successes.
I reflect on the works at home, and laugh at myself. The reason I found it so difficult to call someone is my own lack of competence. I can’t plaster, paint, or change a skirt-board. Not only that, but I seem to struggle with simple tasks, making them neurotically bigger than they are. Renovations are inconvenient, for sure. They require pushing furniture around, covering the floor, and gathering tools and gear. It’s not a complex emergent system though. Yet that’s what I project over them. Hence a sense of hovering mystery surrounding tradies, that may be all in my head. As for the book, it’s not something I’m doing alone, and who knows what it will achieve. Most likely not very much. Besides, I can work on the house and indulge in sitzfleisch because I’m still in a divergent phase of exploration, and my partner covers the bills. All this is hardly the stuff of legend.
Maybe this is why Seneca insisted on having a garden: to stay rooted in the simple things, and reminded that we live not of our own doing, but thanks to a million processes of nature outside our control, that support the life of everything. My partner gives me an ‘Aries moon’ reading of the Tarot. The ace of pentacles comes out to suggest an anchoring activity for the season. I experiment with sprouting. My first pot of black sesame seeds ends in the bin after two days, soaked and unsprouted. But the next batch of mung beans make a great stir-fry.
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I’m addicted to a computer game called Dragonsweeper. Over the past few months, I’ve played it far too many times. A friend introduce it to me. It was thoughtful, and beneficial. Before that, I was addicted to Minesweeper, and played even more. Working on long-term projects, outside established structures, with people on the other side of the world, those little games give me a dopamine hit I struggle to resist. They’re not a great use of my time though. More, I feel my eyes are straining from so much screen time, and games make it worse. So, doubling on humility, I commit to something boring: be mindful of phone use.
So much of my life involves a screen. Computer and phone during the day, then films and Kindle to relax. No wonder my eyes feel tired. It’s too much to go cold turkey, but I can reduce usage, which is what I resolve to do. I substitute. Every night, I use my phone for meditation rather than scrolling, moderating my intake of stimulants before bed.
By the end of the week, I add a simple embodied activity. On Sunday, before an Enspiral potluck, I stop for Qi gong in the Belgrave rainforest. Tending to the body is a form of humility. I can’t will tensions away, some practice is needed. Besides, it means I have to slow down, and exert self-control: spend fifteen minutes to reconnect with myself through simple movements from an old tradition, rather than read, scroll, learn. Billions of people do similar movements. Embodiment is accepting that there is something generic about me. Yet it works. Ten repetitions release a wave of warmth in my back, rippling through the face and down my legs. Cliches exist for a reason. Qi gong among ancient ferns made me feel good.
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Nora Bateson is on a visit to Australia. I attend a warm data lab she’s hosting. It’s a beautiful event, with 140 people or so in an old stable at Abbotsford Convent. I see familiar faces in the audience, and a regonisable vibe. Colours, textures, middle-aged men with scarves.
During reflections at the end, a person with a sparkly cap and a do-gooder vibe asks about outcomes. The practice invites people to explore a topic or question across contexts. The room shares one question – in our case, ‘what is food in a changing world?’ – and forms little groups of four. Papers on the floor give each group a different angle: science, family, law… Over the course of an hour, people move around the room, exploring the topic from a range of perspectives, focusing not on the thing itself but its relationships with other things. All this is great, the person in the sparkly cap says, but they wonder: at some point, we need to act. How do we get there? Nora replies, highlighting the importance of a practice that reveals an ecosystem of possibilities that were not perceived before. By deliberately lifting the need for next actions, even the need to be clever, warm data labs ‘stir’ something in us, as individuals and collectively. New things appear. Sometimes it’s just a feel good moment. Sometimes it’s a deep sense of connection. Sometimes it’s a new solution space, even a paradigm shift. At which point, there’s a range of practices to strategise and operationalise.
This, too, is a form of moderation. Not everything in our lives has to be solution oriented, useful, efficient, productive, or resulting in a to-do list. We need multiple things, including moments to stretch our brains and connect. This blog is driven by a similar intention. Not to serve as a handbook, but a promenade. By hinting at possible connections between ideas and experiences, it might loosen areas of tension in the brain and lift up the energy, trigger new connections that will ripple elsewhere – or just offer a moment of mental leisure.
For me, the experience itself has a humbling moment. I start the event in a small group of four, looking at the question from the angle of culture. People speak in turn, I listen, while ideas form in my head. After a few rounds, there’s a pause. I haven’t said anything yet. Eyes land on me. I describe a tension. I come from cattle breeding country. I see rich food, especially beef, as core to my culture. Family gatherings, intimate memories, involve a slaughtered animal. Not only that, there was a dailiness of this rich food. Yet the same culture has dark shadows. It’s been promoted by a state that connected to the world through patterns of oppression and colonialism. How does this rich abundant food at the centre of my culture tie to those colonial patterns? How can I hold on to this intimate experience, while evolving out of an extractive mindset? A lady sitting in front of me leans forward and asks, assertively, ‘What patterns are you talking about? When I think of French food, I think of it as locally sourced and based on local tradition. How does it tie to the rest of the world?’ Silence, I freeze. Ideas clutter my brain. Chocolate, bananas, sugar. Wheat from the Ukraine, EU subsidies enabled by asymmetries of trade, entitled abundance a result of colonial exploitation. Potatoes, beans, tomatoes and native American genocide. Climate emissions for meat and dairy production that affect the rest of the world. I have no clear answer, complex patterns instead of simple facts. The silence continues, awkwardly long. I mutter ‘I don’t know’ in a depleted tone, and blush. The conversation moves on.
I’ve been used to such environments as caring and gentle. I interpreted the question as a challenge, and folded on myself. I might have got it wrong. Or maybe this lady comes from a different conversational tradition, and defaulted to debating mode. I joined another group after a few minutes, and got over it. Meanwhile, I learned or re-learned something from this moment of humiliation: the limits of my understanding, my capacity to communicate, and our collective readiness to create proper conditions for generative listening.