I’m thinking a lot these days about reframing, ritual, and scary new starts.
This relates to three conversations I’ve had in the past week or so.
The first conversation was with an old friend: someone I’ve known for most of my life. Although we live in widely separated parts of the UK these days, we catch up several times a year to have a few drinks. As he was in my part of the UK this last weekend, we took the opportunity to meet. The location was a one of a well-known chain of pubs, easy for both of us to find, and known for being inexpensive.
We’d forgotten to take into account the fact that it was Easter weekend, a bank holiday. and the place was packed. We found a table right at the back, next to a table seating family a couple of young girls, perhaps four and five years old. Apparently, they were making quite a lot of high-pitched noise, making it difficult for my friend to hear what I was saying.
I say “apparently” because I didn’t notice it at all and I could hear him fairly well over the general background noise. When I was younger I worked for a while as a DJ, an experience which left one ear unable to hear very well at certain high-pitched frequencies. My friend, who works in the outdoors, has perfect hearing. And yet, in that noisy pub, my slightly impaired hearing was actually better fitted to the environment.
The second conversation was with a heavy drinker of my acquaintance. Someone who’s had a troubled time over recent years, he regards himself as ‘a drunk’ rather than ‘an alcoholic’. A drunk, he said, drinks to numb their emotions; they just don’t want to feel anything. A drunk can stop drinking when life gets better and isn’t so painful any more. An alcoholic, though, is an addict: they can’t stop, because they physically need the alcohol.
I don’t know how that theory stands up scientifically, but what was making it difficult for him to give up the booze wasn’t a physical need: it was that he’d settled in to the routine of going to the pub and getting used to the company there. Now that the problems that made him drink were being resolved, he needed to separate himself from the places and people he drank with – and that was much more difficult than giving up the drinking, even though he knew that he had to do it for his own well-being.
The third conversation was about ritual. It was long and covered a lot of ground, but one of the takeaways was that ritual connects our individual experiences to our culture’s shared experiences of the same things, transforming our interpretation and understanding of what we’re going through from something personal and isolated into an echo of something huge and collective.
In the coaching world, this is known as reframing: we change the mental models that we use to interpret experiences. This can both change a negative outlook to a positive one, and empower us by connecting our life to the vast experience of myth.
So, a simple example of this transformation is reframing “I have impaired hearing” – which is a negative framing that diminishes me – to “My hearing is less suited to a quiet outdoor environment but better suited to a noisy indoor environment”. The new framing fits the facts just the same, but acknowledges the simple truth that different contexts require different capabilities.
This leads into my drinker acquaintance’s situation, which represents something many of us have experienced: we’re living in a setting for which we’re not really suited and/or which is fundamentally unhealthy for us. This is really common. And, like him, many of us struggle to make the break. We may desperately dislike our colleagues or friends – but they are at least familiar known quantities. We know where we stand with them – and breaking away into the unknown is frightening. Breaking away and starting over may involve costs and that can also be a frightening prospect, even before we’ve started to evaluate what they may actually be. We may doubt our ability to succeed, or feel that we’ve left it too late.
However, the archetype of the person leaving everything they know and setting off into the perilous unknown is as old as human experience, and appears time and time again in legend, poetry and written history.
We could refer, for example, to the legendary Greek character Odysseus, and Homer’s epic poem about his long and difficult journey from the war in Troy to find the place where he really belonged. For those who feel they are too old to make a new start, we might discuss the way Odysseus was re-imagined by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in his poem Ulysses (the name used by the Romans to refer to Odysseus) in which Odysseus in his old age decides to gather his former crew and set off once more in search of adventure:
” Come, my friends,
‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.”
Bringing the world of myth closer to the world we inhabit, we might introduce Ernest Shackleton, whose heroic leadership during his Antarctic expeditions, bringing success out of apparent disaster, has been turned in articles, books, and movies – elevating him from being an ordinary man to the status of culture hero. What sets Shackleton apart from Odysseus is that we can still discover the intense planning and preparation that took place as he prepared to go out into the unknown.
We don’t have Ulysses’ account books and inventory lists, but we do have Shackleton’s.
It’s the same for us. Making a big change requires practicality and planning, but the first thing that has to happen is the decision to act. The role of myth is to support us, lending us the courage and determination of the generations of uncountable people who have made a similar choices going back to time before memory.
And this is where ritual is important. Any action, large or small, simple or elaborate, to mark our decision to change, if it’s done with meaning and feeling, forms a personal ritual binding our choice and subsequent actions to something far greater than ourselves.
What fresh start are you considering? Do you feel anticipation or trepidation? Which myth or culture hero can you draw on for strength? And what will be your ritual to mark the establishment of that bond?
Good luck.
Photo by Katherine McCormack on Unsplash
Traethiad 