I didn't find a way around my shyness until I was in my mid-30s. It was a camera that I hid behind - and I did literally hide behind it. It was the perfect prop for taking to gigs and events that I would previously have enjoyed (probably) but felt rather awkward at. Primarily, taking photos gave me something to focus on ['scuse pun] and put me into a flow state, when previously I would have been thinking "this is nice, but I hope it ends soon". But also it gave strangers something to talk to me about, and I discovered that I didn't mind them doing so. And finally, it gave me an excuse for ending conversations without awkwardness: "just got to go take some more photos".
Actually, not finally, because I guess where it really started to cook was when I got home. This was around 2006, the heyday of MySpace, where I would post pictures of the gigs on bands' pages. And suddenly I discovered I had loads of "friends". And then I would go out again, and discover that I had loads of *friends*. This online-offline approach to forming friendships has been vital to me ever since the early 90s, most of my closest friends are people I spoke to initially online, although I can see how that can lead to self-selecting ghettoes-of-interest.
And, yeah, the confidence which that experience instilled in me has been a fabulous thing. I'm still, by some measures, dreadfully shy - the idea of approaching a stranger on the street or in the pub fills me with anxiety - but I guess what I really discovered (having very much doubted beforehand) is that I'm fundamentally likeable, and that I thrive when amongst good company. I'm far, far less of a loner than I was back in my 20s.
Thanks, Dan. I definitely recognise that kind of journey, finding the others online in ways that spilt into offline life. It's still part of my experience of the "hand made web" I wrote about a while back, though increasingly it has meant working against the grain of the platforms that make up most of the internet and the devices built to suck up all traces of spare attention. Anyway, one of life's great secrets - especially in a culture that worships youth - is how good it can be to grow older, to find yourself more at home in your own skin than seemed possible in your twenties.
Yeah, I think that way of finding people via social media has become increasingly broken due to enshittification, there was a brief golden age circa 2005-2011 when it worked just great.
And, yes, growing into your own skin is such a treat. I just wish I had the energy and remaining lifespan to put that ease, and the knowledge & wisdom that's come with it, to good use!
“I sometimes hear about the “evolution of consciousness”, where the assumption seems to be that it’s the conditions of modernity and technological progress that make it possible for people to come “fully alive”, but it seems to me almost the opposite”.
I had short stint in Landscape Architecture so I cannot help but see how many spaces (both digital and physical) are simply not designed for socialization. If socializing is considered at all, the space is somehow similar to the interaction with trans hustler you mention. Most public places for socializing today are almost purely in service of financial transactions and extracting money from a very specific socioeconomic demographic of people.
This summer I got to attend a talk by Roger Reeves, an incredibly powerful poet/writer. (His book Dark Days and recent piece in Emergence Magazine will leave you shattered to bits.) He was raised in the African-American Pentecostal church and brought with him a preacherly way of creating community in a space and room that was designed to focus all attention on the speaker.
Before he began, he asked everyone to turn to their neighbor and “say hi to your neighbor”. I was sitting next to a young openly gay/queer Columbian student who had performed a really brave musical piece/poem the day before. Just that one intervention where I looked at them and said “hi” allowed me to feel connected enough to tell them how much I had enjoyed their piece. Since I wasn’t a student and very much felt like an outsider, I’m certain I wouldn’t have said anything otherwise.
That interaction felt so good that I went up to another student who was extremely shy and had read the day before about being “awkward with sweaty palms” and I told her how much I liked her piece and asked if she would mind an elbow bump. I saw her light up and then go up to someone else right after and tell them how much she liked their piece like a chain reaction happening in real time.
Even at a Buddhist University it was this tradition from the African American church that really opened up and made space and community. By de-centering himself Roger Reeves redirected the audience to see and recognize each other and utterly changed the space by breaking the unidirectional spell we were under.
It was amazing to see just how small of a gesture it took to radically change the entire environment. I couldn’t help but see this as a gift that came from a community with shared experience, struggle, and need to acknowledge and support one another without the expectation of financial transaction.
I still find it excruciating to speak publicly but I'm working on it, one dinner table at a time. Alice and I have been attending the Hard Art sessions and just speaking my name gets me in a cold sweat!
"A living culture is a way of being human together that needs its members to come alive, to show up and turn their lives into a gift, a culture that can’t afford the waste of people not coming alive. There’s a kind of high-flown talk I sometimes hear about the “evolution of consciousness”, where the assumption seems to be that it’s the conditions of modernity and technological progress that make it possible for people to come “fully alive”, but it seems to me almost the opposite: that it is only under these conditions that a society can afford the amount of lostness, trappedness, unfaced fear and unfulfilled potential that comes of not attending to the ways in which we come alive as the creatures we are, with the particular gifts we came with or that the passage of life has brought us."
This really is what it is.
Alice has written a guest blog post for Chris Smaje and we would love to hear your thoughts. Hope to see you at Kairos or Unherd.
Hey Joel! Glad that passage resonated – and good to know that the two of you are part of the Hard Art crew. I read Alice's guest post and it sparked lots of thoughts. One immediate connection that came to mind, have you come across A Commune In The North?
Yes, it seems we have currently in the West a normalised misunderstanding of the function of pain and discomfort, a medicalised understanding that perhaps misses the valuable learning, pain as a gift even, is increasingly my understanding. If pain is perceived as something to hide and a mark of failure then we will continue to hide from our neighbours in a way we can no longer afford to. Thanks Dougald!
In the event the Web vanishes -- for a day or two or a decade or more doesn't matter -- I have a folder on my laptops where I keep many of your posts and another labeled Wisdom. This piece has been saved to the latter.
Methinks that mapping and learning how to navigate our psyches is already playing an important role in the processes you are exploring and working with. Stanislav Grof's 'cartography of the psyche', Arnold Mindell's Process Work/Process Oriented Psychology, and Dr Joe Dispenza's approach to meditation are just three of the avenues I've been traveling for decades. The skills and awareness they teach fit hand-in-glove with your (and our) work.
p.s. I'm not even sure that my society, the US, even knows the ABC song well enough to sing it. But then, I hope, we're in the final act of a decades long, slow-motion cultural revolution whose effects and consequences have been far more global than Mao's and are thus more horrifying. Fingers crossed...
Hey Dougald, I can so relate to that. Learning to play the guitar also helped me overcome my shyness. So come and do a tour of South Africa, and I will do an opening act for you on my guitar.. which I also seldom bring out. Here is my audition tape. ;-) https://youtu.be/4qxlLTytWys
So much here that resonates.
I didn't find a way around my shyness until I was in my mid-30s. It was a camera that I hid behind - and I did literally hide behind it. It was the perfect prop for taking to gigs and events that I would previously have enjoyed (probably) but felt rather awkward at. Primarily, taking photos gave me something to focus on ['scuse pun] and put me into a flow state, when previously I would have been thinking "this is nice, but I hope it ends soon". But also it gave strangers something to talk to me about, and I discovered that I didn't mind them doing so. And finally, it gave me an excuse for ending conversations without awkwardness: "just got to go take some more photos".
Actually, not finally, because I guess where it really started to cook was when I got home. This was around 2006, the heyday of MySpace, where I would post pictures of the gigs on bands' pages. And suddenly I discovered I had loads of "friends". And then I would go out again, and discover that I had loads of *friends*. This online-offline approach to forming friendships has been vital to me ever since the early 90s, most of my closest friends are people I spoke to initially online, although I can see how that can lead to self-selecting ghettoes-of-interest.
And, yeah, the confidence which that experience instilled in me has been a fabulous thing. I'm still, by some measures, dreadfully shy - the idea of approaching a stranger on the street or in the pub fills me with anxiety - but I guess what I really discovered (having very much doubted beforehand) is that I'm fundamentally likeable, and that I thrive when amongst good company. I'm far, far less of a loner than I was back in my 20s.
Thanks, Dan. I definitely recognise that kind of journey, finding the others online in ways that spilt into offline life. It's still part of my experience of the "hand made web" I wrote about a while back, though increasingly it has meant working against the grain of the platforms that make up most of the internet and the devices built to suck up all traces of spare attention. Anyway, one of life's great secrets - especially in a culture that worships youth - is how good it can be to grow older, to find yourself more at home in your own skin than seemed possible in your twenties.
Yeah, I think that way of finding people via social media has become increasingly broken due to enshittification, there was a brief golden age circa 2005-2011 when it worked just great.
And, yes, growing into your own skin is such a treat. I just wish I had the energy and remaining lifespan to put that ease, and the knowledge & wisdom that's come with it, to good use!
“I sometimes hear about the “evolution of consciousness”, where the assumption seems to be that it’s the conditions of modernity and technological progress that make it possible for people to come “fully alive”, but it seems to me almost the opposite”.
I had short stint in Landscape Architecture so I cannot help but see how many spaces (both digital and physical) are simply not designed for socialization. If socializing is considered at all, the space is somehow similar to the interaction with trans hustler you mention. Most public places for socializing today are almost purely in service of financial transactions and extracting money from a very specific socioeconomic demographic of people.
This summer I got to attend a talk by Roger Reeves, an incredibly powerful poet/writer. (His book Dark Days and recent piece in Emergence Magazine will leave you shattered to bits.) He was raised in the African-American Pentecostal church and brought with him a preacherly way of creating community in a space and room that was designed to focus all attention on the speaker.
Before he began, he asked everyone to turn to their neighbor and “say hi to your neighbor”. I was sitting next to a young openly gay/queer Columbian student who had performed a really brave musical piece/poem the day before. Just that one intervention where I looked at them and said “hi” allowed me to feel connected enough to tell them how much I had enjoyed their piece. Since I wasn’t a student and very much felt like an outsider, I’m certain I wouldn’t have said anything otherwise.
That interaction felt so good that I went up to another student who was extremely shy and had read the day before about being “awkward with sweaty palms” and I told her how much I liked her piece and asked if she would mind an elbow bump. I saw her light up and then go up to someone else right after and tell them how much she liked their piece like a chain reaction happening in real time.
Even at a Buddhist University it was this tradition from the African American church that really opened up and made space and community. By de-centering himself Roger Reeves redirected the audience to see and recognize each other and utterly changed the space by breaking the unidirectional spell we were under.
It was amazing to see just how small of a gesture it took to radically change the entire environment. I couldn’t help but see this as a gift that came from a community with shared experience, struggle, and need to acknowledge and support one another without the expectation of financial transaction.
Thank you 🙏 as always Dougald.
I still find it excruciating to speak publicly but I'm working on it, one dinner table at a time. Alice and I have been attending the Hard Art sessions and just speaking my name gets me in a cold sweat!
"A living culture is a way of being human together that needs its members to come alive, to show up and turn their lives into a gift, a culture that can’t afford the waste of people not coming alive. There’s a kind of high-flown talk I sometimes hear about the “evolution of consciousness”, where the assumption seems to be that it’s the conditions of modernity and technological progress that make it possible for people to come “fully alive”, but it seems to me almost the opposite: that it is only under these conditions that a society can afford the amount of lostness, trappedness, unfaced fear and unfulfilled potential that comes of not attending to the ways in which we come alive as the creatures we are, with the particular gifts we came with or that the passage of life has brought us."
This really is what it is.
Alice has written a guest blog post for Chris Smaje and we would love to hear your thoughts. Hope to see you at Kairos or Unherd.
Hey Joel! Glad that passage resonated – and good to know that the two of you are part of the Hard Art crew. I read Alice's guest post and it sparked lots of thoughts. One immediate connection that came to mind, have you come across A Commune In The North?
https://www.acommuneinthenorth.org.uk/
A couple of old friends of mine are involved and it seems like there might be a good conversation to be had there.
Yes, it seems we have currently in the West a normalised misunderstanding of the function of pain and discomfort, a medicalised understanding that perhaps misses the valuable learning, pain as a gift even, is increasingly my understanding. If pain is perceived as something to hide and a mark of failure then we will continue to hide from our neighbours in a way we can no longer afford to. Thanks Dougald!
In the event the Web vanishes -- for a day or two or a decade or more doesn't matter -- I have a folder on my laptops where I keep many of your posts and another labeled Wisdom. This piece has been saved to the latter.
Methinks that mapping and learning how to navigate our psyches is already playing an important role in the processes you are exploring and working with. Stanislav Grof's 'cartography of the psyche', Arnold Mindell's Process Work/Process Oriented Psychology, and Dr Joe Dispenza's approach to meditation are just three of the avenues I've been traveling for decades. The skills and awareness they teach fit hand-in-glove with your (and our) work.
p.s. I'm not even sure that my society, the US, even knows the ABC song well enough to sing it. But then, I hope, we're in the final act of a decades long, slow-motion cultural revolution whose effects and consequences have been far more global than Mao's and are thus more horrifying. Fingers crossed...
Hey Dougald, I can so relate to that. Learning to play the guitar also helped me overcome my shyness. So come and do a tour of South Africa, and I will do an opening act for you on my guitar.. which I also seldom bring out. Here is my audition tape. ;-) https://youtu.be/4qxlLTytWys