Clarity for Teachers: Day 39
‘Your drama is a symptom of not investing enough effort in being clear. Try harder.’
The world needs to be read. It requires our attention and our interpretation, our ability to read the signs and the symptoms.
This goes all the way back. Thousands of generations of reading the tracks and traces of the creatures we hunted, alert to the creatures that hunted us. A fine-tuned literacy that few of us have now.
In the grid of a modern city, the signs are standardised and simplified, they demand nothing like the attention of which we are capable and so they allow us to move at speed in deadly machines. And still, to operate within this system it is essential to know that the red light and the green light are not just striking colours. The instructions are never spelt out, except when we are explaining the world to our children.
Within the social layer of human language, there is plenty that never gets spelt out. Few things are more bewildering than to attempt to navigate the world, taking what everyone says at face value.
It’s late on a Friday night and I’m 22, living in a student house, watching a film on TV. My housemate’s friend comes into the living room and sits down next to me. After a few minutes, she asks, ‘Are you following this?’ Do I really think she’s asking for a plot summary? Or does some mix of shyness and shaky self-esteem make it hard to consider the possibility that she may be expressing an interest in me, rather than the film? Either way, I proceed to tell her all about what had happened before she came in, and soon afterwards she yawns and takes herself off to bed.
People aren’t always saying what they seem to be saying, and a head full of facts can be a hindrance when it comes to reading the signs, knowing what to ask, how to test the deeper waters below the surface of what is being said.
So here comes drama — and by that, I take it that we mean anything that breaks the gentle flow of being, anything that churns the waters and sets the body and mind into excitement or indignation. You’re angry, you’re aroused, and maybe you act on it, throw yourself into conflict. That’s one way drama can get a hold on you, but there are others. Instead of acting, you try to analyse the drama, and now you think you’re getting deeper, learning things about yourself. Well, this is where today’s advice kicks in: the dive into analysing the drama is just another way of getting sucked in, it says; another way of missing the point.
Your drama is not the disease, it’s a symptom, and focusing on it will only muddy the waters. This is the advice. Learn to read drama, to treat it as a clue, not to what it seems to be about, but to the state you were in before it hit. How long will you let the drama carry you? How much of your day or your week is it going to eat? The choice is not reducible to an act of willpower once the drama hits you, it has to do with the everyday work of being clear — all the advice we’ve had so far. This isn’t hard the way a maths problem is hard, it’s hard the way chopping wood and carrying water is hard. It’s an effort, that’s what it is.
Västerås, 27 April, 2020
This is the thirty-ninth in a series of commentaries on ‘A teacher’s advice on how to be clear’, Charlie Davies’s reworking of the 1000-year-old Buddhist text, ‘Advice from Atisha’s Heart’. I’m writing these as I take part in Clarity for Teachers, a course that Charlie is leading. You can find out more on the How To Be Clear website.
