Clarity for Teachers: Day 4
‘Find places that make it easier to be clear and spend your time there.’
‘I am where I think,’ declares Walter Mignolo. He is pushing back against one of the foundational declarations of Western modernity, Descartes’s most famous line, ‘I think, therefore I am.’
Coming out of the culture Descartes was involved in founding, I know how easy it is for me to think of thinking (and being) as something that goes on inside a sealed box behind my eyes. How easy it is to withdraw from wherever I happen to be, into the world inside my head.
As I write this on a Saturday morning, still in my dressing gown, lying on the bed, I’m interrupted by my four-year-old son: he wanders in from the next room, where he is watching TV on his mum’s laptop on the sofa (he has chicken pox just now, so he’s got a special dispensation), to tell me about something he’s just seen. I’m aware that both of us are sat at these machines, portals to anywhere and nowhere, that only add to the ease with which we can disappear from where we happen to be.
I take today’s advice as an invitation to pay more attention to where I am and the ways in which this matters. How the stuff that’s going on ‘in my head’ is always actually tangled up with where I am. And not just to notice this, in a detached way, but to act on it — to look for the places that are good to think with, to bring this into my choices. And maybe also to notice the ways that I open or close myself to the places in which I spend my time, to catch the moment when I disappear into my head, or into the screen.
Västerås, 7 March, 2020
This is the fourth 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 part of my participation in Clarity for Teachers, a course that Charlie is leading. You can find out more on the How To Be Clear website.
