Courage – Week 6
Where I reflect on extraversion, fixing holes and momentum.
Here’s a scene I remember. We’re in central Strasbourg, on a cool Saturday of early Spring 1996. I’m 17, and I live alone. It’s the middle of year 12, my step father didn’t want me home, he and my mum live far out of town, my father’s in a different city, so child support money goes to a small studio. I’m a brainy teenager, top of my class in a selective entry school, and spend a lot of my time reading. My mental health is also shaky. I’ve spent the whole morning inside that day, reading some work of literature or history, and I can feel a wave of despair coming up. I push myself out the door. Within minutes, standing at a McDonald’s for a soft serve, the flows of the world wash off my melancholy. I can feel city life around, observe the people, engage with them, and my mood lifts.
I heard about MBTI about sixteen years ago. I only discovered much later it all derives from Carl Jung’s writing. In Psychological Types, Jung distinguishes between two main ways of engaging with the world: extraversion and introversion. It’s not so much about whether people ‘get tired from social engagement’, but different modes of relationship between subject and object – extraverts drawn to things out there, introverts more interested in the ripples of those things inside them. Jung associates those types with two fundamental adaptive models. Extraversion engages outwards in a movement of enhanced fertility, spreading the self into the world. Introversion retreats, protecting the subject by creating a buffer from what’s out there. With this come downsides, of course: conformism, aloofness.
I grew up with an introverted mother, fiercely original, independent, and with more love for animals than people. My jovial, gregarious, extraverted father left for a different city when I was eight years old. By temperament, I’m somewhere between them. Growing up with just one of them, I developed a behaviour bias towards introverted responses. I’ve have to retrain myself and make a conscious effort to get out of myself and into the world, which is often what I need.
This has been reflected in my basic understanding of courage. By default, I think of it as an extraverted effort to break out of fantasy, try things out, and test the resistance of the real. Be more like my dad. Yet there’s another aspect of courage, of equal value, which my mum has ingrained in me from my childhood: it’s resisting the pull of prejudice and spontaneous responses in the name of an idea, a vision, or a principle. It’s endurance in the face of difficulty. It’s following your own course, even if the world as it is does not readily welcome it. It’s sticking to wisdom in the face of others’ folly. Courage is balancing those two modes.
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Some things we learn only by engaging with reality. Four weeks ago, I called an electrician to remove a mounted heater from my living room. I did not anticipate it would leave holes in the wall. It’s a good opportunity to learn a trade. I went to Bunnings and bought gear: a pot of plaster, a bottle of binder, and a mask. One evening, I’m home alone and find myself in the mood. I take out the binder, and start pouring it into the holes. It’s a thick liquid which I imagine will behave like blue tack or putty. Except, it’s a thick liquid that comes in a bottle. It does not hold itself or set instantly. White streaks drip along the wall. I quickly grab tissues and mop, then fold over the tissue, and mop again. Of course I haven’t put on gloves, there’s binder everywhere, and it sticks to my fingers. The bottle recommends washing with abundant soap and water in case of skin contact. Which I do – then mop again, fold again, wash again, in some funny chaos. It was my first ever time fixing a hole in the wall – none of this had crossed my mind. Maybe trades do need learning properly.
When the dripping stops, I get some phone time and come across yet another article stating that AI will soon take over ‘all our jobs’ affecting ‘everyone’. I look at my wall, the random holes in it, the mess around, and wonder. How close are we to tradie robots, who can engage with all the quirks of an old building and the people who live in it? What else is just as peculiar, concrete, and random as fixing holes in a wall, and cannot be just automated away? Or is it that ‘everyone’ is just a way to say ‘many people’? But then who precisely, to do what precisely? How much of AI is fantasy, then, an introverted version of work that forgets about the world out there, and the resistance of the real?
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I’m involved in a large number of collaborative projects as a way to feed my extraverted needs. Those projects give me something to latch onto. Which makes me particularly grumpy when people cancel. I’ve been supporting this friend for about a year, with regular ideating sessions over a white board or on the phone. He’s involved in cool meaningful stuff, but also very chaotic. I insist on scheduling our catch ups, but even that isn’t quite enough. We’re due to meet at lunchtime, I was looking forward to some external feed for my brain. He comes 90 minutes late, and I have to cut short for a call.
I took this as an opportunity to train my own boundaries, and chose an indirect approach. I support people pro bono for all sorts of idealistic reasons, but also for my own balance. Like a cyclist needs momentum, I need something to do with someone to stay vertical. More – I’m projecting myself into whatever is planned that day to get the momentum going. If I can’t rely on someone to turn up, I will have to find another source of energy, and another point of focus.
When I started Marco Polo Project, a small charity doing intercultural work against the odds, it was clear that our biggest risk was my own burn out. So, that took precedence. The same applies now. I’m finishing books, supporting orgs through their growing pains, and launching new projects, all at the same time. It’s winter, and the world is a mess. Courage involves a deliberate cultivation of zest: not falling into despair, and maintaining self-confidence.
This applies to my own writing. As this project reaches its soft-bellied middle point, I hold on to the little things. When I started the year, I set myself a set of regular to do’s: exercise, meditation, stretching. I let commitments slip, as we do. It doesn’t mean I have to give up. In meditation, I learned that I can return to the breath, and start again.
Twice in the week, I gave myself a push to get things over the line. Tuesday, I set off to finish a number of tasks, including upgrade the landing page for a new project. I let myself be distracted by a silly game, and didn’t finish my website before meeting my partner for a concert. I chose to stay up, and had a new version online before midnight. Sunday morning, I wake up late after a birthday party the night before. We’re meeting people for an artsy mini golf experience in the corridors of Flinders Street Station. I have a walk and dinner scheduled with another friend right after. Meanwhile, there’s a long to-do list in my head of small things scheduled for the day: exercise, qi gong, meditate, publish a post, send messages, get new glasses. The mini-golf ends up being shorter than planned. I let the friends head off to lunch without me, and tick off items in my list over the next ninety minutes. Other than getting new glasses, everything is done by the time I get on the train, and I can enjoy a relaxing walk.
As for my commitment to do something difficult every day, I just lower the bar. I finally write down the recuperation codes for my Google account, in case I lose my phone and can’t use two factor authentication, and I reach out to six old friends I haven’t spoken to for a while. It's a joyful thing to do – just one I’d been pushing to ‘later’. And now I have a phone catch up scheduled with an old friend and neighbour from Paris, giving me something outside myself to look forward to, momentum, and greater balance.