Finding Our Place In Line
There’s an icebreaker exercise that has shown up sometimes with groups I have either led or been part of. All the participants are asked to array themselves in a straight line in order of their birth. You can say from youngest to oldest or oldest to youngest. Then everyone scrambles and tries to figure out a way to make that happen quickly. Usually one or two voices sing out loudly “May 12th 1953” or “January 4th 1956” (insert your own appropriate dates here) and then they have provided an immediate backbone which other people can reference and help them find their own place in line.
Then you will hear other dates in the middle solidifying things and before long the very last person slots into place and you have a straight line from A to Z, everyone in place, and then maybe the occasional person says I’m older than you are or you belong up there but, for the most part, things shape up as they should.
I’ve been thinking about that exercise lately, because it’s how my real life feels. Sometimes I take the lead and shout out and others line up near me and sometimes my only task is to listen to another person’s voice and go there. To just follow and help make the line. I’m getting a lot of help these days, working on some important stuff, and without it I’m lost, just wandering around shouting out my birthday to the wind.
It’s hard to know where we are without other people. Where do we stand? Where do we go? Around what can we orient our lives?
Mary Oliver wrote this about finding our place, in the poem Wild Geese
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
There is somewhere for each of us to line up, we have a place, but it’s in the context of our common humanity.
