Words: Clare Dwyer Hogg
Image: Barney Beech
What do you make of this image? A person, standing tall. Arms stretched ahead, straight. On their forearms, they’re balancing long horizontal poles. The poles stay – still.
It’s quite Zen, isn’t it? Admirable, even. As an exercise in balance and strength, it could be instructive. There’s a problem, though. The picture came to me when I was considering some of my attitudes. So if that image represents me, I’m not happy. How the person is holding the poles means they can’t move much. The poles, rather than the person, are dictating the level of movement. It seemed like an abstract picture; suddenly it’s a little too real.
Sometimes in adulthood we find ourselves balancing weights that aren’t ours to balance. We bear standards or unarticulated ideals, just because. And then we keep upholding them because, well, that’s just what we’re doing. They aren’t weights that we have consciously grasped with our hands. They’re not an active decision to carry things that are part of our philosophy, or duty, or because they are responsibilities that are ours to take. There’s a big difference between the two.
For instance: I am not very good at admitting I need help. Even as I write this, I know there is some unhelpful pride in there, because I feel a teeny bit like I’m justified. I’ve proved I can do things without help lots of times. Yet I also know that I can do things much more easily if I ask for help. When I do, I’m often pleasantly surprised that I don’t feel like a helpless cretin for asking.
I want to be strong enough to do things on my own, to have the mind to strategise when I fall at hurdles, and to keep going
Asking, though, requires me to stop balancing the standard that doesn’t want to be seen as needy. It’s not a fabulous standard to have, really. So many times, that balancing act (because it is an act) has looked good externally, but absorbing the difficulty internally meant splintering stress fractures that I had to fix later. It does build strength, but in the wrong places.
If I set down those long balancing-pole standards, and really scrutinise them, I’ll find some elements that I want to keep. Of course I will: I wouldn’t have held them up this long if they didn’t contain some good. The issue is about how I hold my standards, and whether I’ve chosen to take them on in the first place.
It’s clear that standard bearing is much easier when the standards are imbued within your own internal workings. I want to consciously choose them, and allow them to filter through how I think and act. So in this case: I want to be strong enough to do things on my own, to have the mind to strategise when I fall at hurdles, and to keep going. I want to know the difference between needing help and being needy. Fine.
What springs from this conscious decision-making is a way of being that has movement. As I experience different circumstances, I can apply my standards, figure out if I’m being strong or stubborn, learn when I’ve made the right or wrong choices. I should notice the difference. I’m choosing movement. Not a form of living that is stuck. And absolutely not one that has never been fully articulated.
