Mind Set Go

This is found in Mary Catherine Bateson’s 1990 book, Composing a Life (p. 231): “… the central survival skill is surely the capacity to pay attention and respond to changing circumstances, to learn and adapt, to fit into new environments beyond the safety of temple precincts.”  Is living “beyond the safety of temple precincts” a concept for consideration or for more consideration—should any of us ever have considered that at all!  How well are we paying attention?  How well are we responding to changes?  Are we, in fact, learning and adapting?  If we are, how well are we doing that, and what tools are available to help us do that?

There seem to be events in life which jog the mundane, jolting the routine of daily existence out of synch with that which we accept as normal.  And, I believe, there are instincts which can be aroused by such events.  Noticing things around us, taking actions we would previously not have taken, feeling new convictions and not just creating new opinions, but actually voicing them are examples of conscious awareness that may stem from such events.

What events might stir the subconscious pot of what one might consider to be a complacency of what we accept as normal?  Does it take a pandemic, a life-threatening diagnosis, a relocation and a giving up of jobs, an experience too close for comfort in a bombing, intervening in a dog attack in which someone else’s life was threatened and placing one’s own life in danger when also being attacked?  Might it also take experiencing life on a level with deeper introspection and meditation? 

Those are actual events which have jogged my own awareness just in the last decade or so.  I have had experiences which have profoundly changed my life—not necessarily in reaction to them but as growth from them.  What I would like to share here, in this forum, is information (I have gleaned from my own personal reading and personal experiences in meditation) which might have some value to someone else. 

I am not proposing that the ways I have been paying attention and responding are end-all answers or solutions.  However, I believe sharing matters and that, although we cannot live each other’s lives, empathy matters as well.  Perhaps along the way, together, we can expand our concepts of what constitutes our own and others’ temple precincts as we “fit into new environments” without the mind clutter of necessarily needing to fit in.  And, maybe, just maybe, sharing is a tool that could, and perhaps should, be in our toolkit of survival.