twister
[my year in review station 19]
Take a turn.
Spin until you have placed your left hand, right hand, left foot, and right foot all on the board.
Take note of your position.
Hold it for a moment. Be body aware.
Consider the placement of your right hand.
Do you feel awkward or at ease?
How do you think your awkwardness or ease relates to where your other hand and feet are positioned?
Move your awareness from your right hand to your left leg.
Consider your foot placement.
Does this feel awkward or at ease? How do you think your awkwardness or ease relates to where your other foot and hands are positioned?Now move your awareness from your left leg to your right leg.
Consider your foot placement.
Does this feel awkward or at ease? How do you think your awkwardness or ease relates to where your other foot and hands are positioned?
Finally, move your awareness from your right leg to your left hand.
Consider your hand placement.
Does this feel awkward or at ease? How do you think your awkwardness or ease relates to where your other hand and feet are positioned?
Okay. You are done.
Find a quiet place to sit near the twister mat . . . but allowing for the next person to jump in.
The following thoughts have been sparked from a podcast by Rob Bell and Peter Rollins
Looking back over the past year — scanning it as if you are rewinding through a dvr of your own life.
Consider times where you have felt at ease with life.
Were there moments you remember where you felt like you had a handle on life? Where you felt like things were going smoothly or where nothing was “rocking the boat?”
Consider times where you have felt quite upside down and disrupted.
Do you remember times, this past year, where you felt like the “bottom dropped out?” Do you remember moments where you felt like you couldn’t find stable footing? You felt upside down?
Consider times where you may have felt different because of this sense of disruption.
Have there been any moments where maybe the chaos was still going, but you had an ease about the chaos? Can you think of a time where you felt like you were “going with the flow” no matter how big the waves were?
We all go through different seasons, phases, moments where we see our life from a few common places. At times, we see life in a way where we have a handle on things. It seems to work a certain way, and we’ve got it down. This would be understood as seeing life from a position of ORIENTATION.
If you have a smart phone on you, pull it out and open up the map app.
If it asks you to find your current location, click yes and observe the process.
Being oriented is like the moment when your map app locates your position. North is up. South is down. East and West in right and left respectively. The dot of your location is found and the grid is drawn, streets names are filled in, and everything on the screen makes sense — leading you to understand where you actually stand.
We all prefer an ORIENTED point of view. It’s comforting. It’s secure. It’s like standing on the twister board without contorting or bending at all.
Can you think of a time where you felt pretty at ease with the world around you?
However, life is not an ORIENTING process. It’s actually a DISORIENTATING experience. The nature of life is that we can — to a degree — feel oriented, but it also the natural to our experience of life to experience a sense of derailing from the grid of our understanding. This is a jolt to our system. Our reference points no longer exist like they used to. Our compass is all messed up. Our sense of what is up and what is down is confused.
DISORIENTATION sets in when we experience something that exposes how little control we actual have. In twister, we have been asked to cross limbs and bend in a way that feels unnatural. It hurts and strains our body.
The disruption that creates DISORIENTATION is known in philosophy as an Event. In theology it is an Apocalypse. An event is something that happens and you cannot expect it. An apocalypse makes room for something novel and new to happen. It ushers in a different future. An apocalypse turns over your table of understanding — it flips your world upside down.
Can you think of a time where you’ve known disorientation in the past year?
At least at the beginning of our disruption — anger and fear and anxiety can all be apart of our response. It is perfectly natural. Our tendency, when twisted up and bent out of shape is to find comfort any way possible. Hurry up and end the twister game — control the situation — force the next move. We want desperately to return to a world that is simple again — so we split everything into good and bad. We create again simplistic dichotomies that make everything very black and white. It’s our honest and natural way of dealing with the stress and strain of disorientation. We judge. We categorize. We label and place things in boxes. We see cause and effect — and make simple formulas to attempt an ORIENTED view of life again.
But there is something to this DISORIENTATION that is meant to leave us different than it found us. We can no longer be TRULY okay with a simplistic orientation anymore.
Peter Rollins says,
“The difference between disorientation and reorienting oneself . . . is not where you get to a place of absolute certainty where you have all the answers. But a part of being human is trying to work with and live with a certain disruption that is always happening . . .”
So the place being DISORIENTATION is not ORIENTATION — where we cling desperately to old and simplistic ways of viewing the world. Instead, we slowly (and painfully at times) become REORIENTED where we can live within twists and turns of life.
We must find a way to be calm in the midst of chaos,
to be at peace within the complex,
to find a sense of new comfortable with nuance.
Can we embrace the instability of life as it unfolds?
Rollins references Søren Kierkegaard and his view of faith, saying,
“Faith is being at peace with chaos — with paradox — with the disruption of your existence — with the absurd. And the absurd is simply experiencing the breakdown of your world . . . (Existence itself is unsettles us).”
Rollins makes a point to say that it is not about being okay with all that has been disrupted — life is thoroughly unsettling. However, faith leads to embracing and working with the absurdity. New universes are dreamt up through our disruption.
“The believer humanly comprehends how heavy the suffering is, but in faith’s wonder that it is beneficial to him, he devoutly says: It is light. Humanly he says: It is impossible, but he says it again in faith’s wonder that what he humanly cannot understand is beneficial to him. In other words, when sagacity is able to perceive the beneficialness, then faith cannot see God; but when in the dark night of suffering sagacity cannot see a handbreadth ahead of it, then faith can see God, since faith sees best in the dark.”
- Søren Kierkegaard
What stands out to you most in the station?
I think what I spend much of my formative years understanding faith to be was actually control. However, faith is not control at all. Faith sounds a lot more like flow. And flow seems a lot less like forcing a lesson to be learned in tragedies or heartbreak and more like feeling life deeply life — and viewing with grace and awareness our own response to the disorientation.
