Conversations For Transformation:
Essays Inspired By The Ideas Of Werner Erhard
Conversations For Transformation
Essays By Laurence Platt
Inspired By The Ideas Of Werner Erhard
And More
Fight, Flee, Or Face Up
(The Train Is In The Station)
Napa Union High School Auditorium, Napa, California, USA
March 31, 2005
This essay,
Fight, Flee, Or Face Up (The Train Is In The Station),
is the one hundredth in this
Conversations For Transformation
internet series. That doesn't mean anything. It's just
what's so.
There are three possible responses to real or imaginary challenges:
1)
fight,
2)
flee, or
3)
face up.
It's the third possible response which interests me. What facing up
really is is becoming present to the situation. The first two, fight or
flight, are for the most part automatic responses. There's
nothing wrong
with either of them. We're constructed to respond this way from time to
time. It's what ensures our safety and our survival. Literally, it's
what comes with the package. But what facing up brings which is
new, which doesn't come with the package is accountability,
responsibility, and possibility. This is
who I am.
This is what's happening. I'm responsible for this. Now
what?
These realizations are the very stuff of transformed living. They don't
create themselves, neither do you have a right to them, and neither are
they easy to wrestle with. If transformation were easy, wouldn't the
entire world be transformed by now?
Ask: What's my choice here? What possibility can I invent here?
Whatever the answers to these questions are, asking them allows
something new to emerge, something more than simply a hormonal
endrocrinal keyed response for which no one except your own
clockwork-ness can take any credit.
Notice you can't answer these questions authentically and neither will
anything new show up until you get present to the situation and face up
to the challenge - fight and flight are not options. It's not just that
you can't have a worthwhile inquiry when no one is at home. It's that
the problem state, whatever the problem is, is always axiomatically
congruent with the über-conversation "this
isn't it". Simply by facing up to it, the problem state is
vanquished. Nothing changes out there, yet the missing link -
presence (or listening, if you will) - returns. Someone
is at home. The train is in the station.
It's OK the way it is,
and there's choice in the matter of the future again.
What stops you living a life you love is not the past you had but the
future you don't have. What makes for living a life you
love is inventing
a future worth living
into.