Learning to Show Up

A story about shyness, technology and busking

Here’s a story that starts from a moment on my recent US tour, though this one is somewhere off to the side of the America Through the Cracks series I’ve been writing. At the end of this post, you’ll also find details of live events this autumn in London, in various corners of Sweden, and online.

Adams Morgan, Washington DC (Photo: Mike Maguire)

It was towards ten at night and we had just left Johnny Pistolas. Mid-September in DC, still warm enough to walk around in T-shirts. We were headed to the bar where Elias’s daughter works and I’d invited along two undergraduates who had travelled up from North Carolina for the event. Since I mostly teach outside of an institutional setting, I don’t get a lot of contact with folks that age, so when they do show up, I’m glad of the chance to hear how things look from where they find themselves.

There are plenty of people out in Adams Morgan on a Wednesday night. On a street corner, we’re hailed cheerily by a trans woman holding a bundle of brightly coloured cards. One of the students stops to see what she wants.

“Which one do you like?” she says, thrusting the bundle into her hands.

The student flips through a set of A4-sized, laminated print-outs of digital artworks, fantasy landscapes.

“You have to choose one!” says the artist, and the student obeys. “It’s yours!” she declares, presenting it to her. “Now, I ask for a donation. Can you give me thirty dollars?”

An awkward negotiation follows, a Venmo number is produced and money is transferred.

As we walk away from the scene of this hustle, I tell the others, “I used to be a busker, so I’m basically on the side of anyone making a living from art on the street – but that has to be the least sympathetic way of doing so I’ve yet encountered.”

They ask what I used to do and I tell them about the year I spent travelling around Europe, singing on street corners and living off what people put in my guitar case.

“Do you still play?” Elias asks, and I give my usual answer, which is that the guitar comes out now and then, but probably not as often as it should do.

Then, fifty yards further down the street, another answer comes to me, because Elias is telling us how working in a bar has changed his daughter.

“You can’t be shy when you’re working in a bar,” he says. “You learn how to talk to anyone.”

“When I was eighteen, nineteen, twenty, I needed the guitar, because I was shy. And I’m still shy by nature, but the reason the guitar doesn’t come out so often is that I became someone who can do what you saw me do tonight.”

It had been one of the smaller events on the tour, two dozen of us sat in a circle in the back bar. Small enough that we could go round and have everyone say a little about what had brought them there. After that, I spoke for half an hour without a script, telling stories from the book and the tour, weaving in themes that people had touched on in the go-round. Then there were questions, which prompted more stories, and time to talk afterwards in smaller groups, where I got to hear the stories of those who had come. It had been a good evening. I was doing one of the things that is mine to do.

I notice something light up in the other student, when I name my own shyness. A mutual recognition. And what he tells me next has stayed with me: knowing how it is to be shy, he worries for his peers for whom the smartphone and the networks to which it connects us provide an omnipresent escape route from the vulnerability of social contact, so that it’s possible to avoid the kind of learning that goes on if you take a job behind a bar for half a year, or just from having to meet new people face-to-face when you start university or walk into the lounge of a backpackers’ hostel. Instead, it sounds like what he’s seeing are patterns of behaviour reinforced by these technologies, whole subcultures and identities, sometimes with accompanying diagnoses, which validate the fear of exposure to each other.

In the weeks since, I’ve been drawn back to that conversation and the memory of the way the guitar was part of my being young. It would be easy to say that I used to hide behind it, and that as I got older I found other things to hide behind, until the identity of author and speaker came to play that role. But I don’t think that’s the whole story.

It’s more like, in the course of life, if we’re lucky, each of us is learning how to show up, to get out of our own way, to be – in

Elizabeth Oldfield

’s words – “fully alive”. And emerging from the fog of adolescence, one of the first ways I found of doing this was to sling a guitar strap over my neck and sing out.¹ With time, the possibility grows that the thing that happens with the guitar – or in the company of that particular friend, or whatever the first version of this was for you – can happen in other ways; and maybe with the years, there comes a point at which that’s just how you show up, who you are, in the high moments and the everyday moments alike.

For me, at least, that’s more and more the question: how do I show up, fully alive, not just under the strangely easier circumstances of singing on a street corner or speaking to a roomful of people, but in the joys and strains of being a neighbour, or (hardest of all) with my family at the breakfast table when my nervous system is still grinding towards wakefulness.

And I realise that this is intrinsic to the language of “regrowing a living culture” which Anna and I landed on in the early going of a school called HOME. 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.

As Vanessa Andreotti once said to me, from an Indigenous perspective, the way of life of modernity looks a lot like “everyone sitting in kindergarten class for their whole lives, singing the ABC song over and over.” The answer isn’t to fetishise Indigeneity, or to sink into mourning over some imagined pristine Other way of being human, but to start from here, looking for the traces, the places where we do come alive, the role that we play for each other in this process.²

I remain convinced that this is more important – even when it comes to the biggest and most urgent aspects of the trouble around and ahead of us – than the language I do most of my writing and thinking in can easily express.³ But tricking this language into gesturing in such a direction seems also to be a part of the work that is mine to do.⁴

Events this autumn

As I settle back on this side of the Atlantic, and as we prepare for this autumn’s five-week online series on the Pockets, Patterns & Practices involved in regrowing a living culture, I’m looking forward to a scattering of events in Sweden, the UK and online which some of you may want to join me for:

• 12 October, Uppsala – Tomorrow, I’ll be giving the keynote at the annual gathering of Sweden’s Transition Network. Interest seems to have exploded this year and the paid tickets have sold out, but they have a circus tent outside the venue where the talks will be relayed.

• 29 October, London – I’ll be speaking at the Kairos club, “a new London space exploring radical ideas for social and cultural change in response to the climate and nature crises”. Most tickets are already sold, but they are releasing a final tranche closer to the event.

• 31 October, London – my second public event during what is mainly a family visit to the UK will be a conversation with Flo Read at the UnHerd Club in Westminster. I’m guessing this will be a slightly different crowd to at Kairos, so it would be great to have some regular readers and friends in the mix.

• 6 & 7 November, online – this is when we get going with the autumn series with a school called HOME. Each week, there’s a teaching session that starts with a talk from me followed by a discussion, then an afterparty where we play with Zoom rooms to create a chance to get to know each other better.

• 28 November, Dals-Långed – I’m looking forward to visiting HDK Steneby, the rural, craft-oriented campus of the University of Gothenburg’s School of Design & Crafts, where I’ll be giving the keynote at Reimagining Rural, a public symposium. I’ve promised them a talk under the title, “I Make Where I Am (or, At Work in the Ruins of the World’s Most Modern Country)”. There doesn’t seem to be a public announcement of this event yet, but if you want to come, drop me a note and I’ll connect you with the organisers.

• 29 November, online – I’ll join Elizabeth Debold of the German magazine, Evolve, for a three-hour session exploring themes from At Work in the Ruins. When Elizabeth interviewed me earlier this year, it turned out to be one of the most interesting conversations I’ve had about the book, so I have a good feeling about this event. Besides the two of us talking, the format will also include small-group dialogues and a plenary where we hear back from these.

• 3 December, Lund – the Environmental Humanities research node at Lund University have organised an afternoon seminar around Dark Mountain and At Work in the Ruins.

For news of future events, make sure you’re subscribed to this Substack – and I look forward to the chance to meet more of you in the course of the autumn.

DH

1. First at church and in folk clubs, later on street corners, in backpackers’ hostels and at freshers’ week parties.

2. I think again of Ivan Illich’s concept of “rests”, which I wrote about in my first post from the American tour.

3. As I wrote this sentence, an email arrived from someone who wants to arrange for Thai subtitles to the long interview which Katie Teague filmed with me the morning after the DC event.

4.

Elizabeth Oldfield

had a great post yesterday on vocation that weaves together all kinds of wisdom around this notion of “the work that is ours to do”.