Courage

We had two chats yesterday.

In the morning we talked about the AOLs 

We talked a lot about how the AOLs are capturing your experiences. The experiences that you feel are learning (responsibility) at MA level. Because of this one persons AOL might be a completely different topic from another persons. In fact it is not the topic that makes it at MA level it is the depth of analysis, understanding sensitivity that you have of the topic that makes it MA.

Across the years I have heard people say they don’t understand (don’t want to bother with) all the theory (particularly introduced in Module Two).  We talked about this in the evening chat. But we are not working with theory as something different from practice. The reason your AOL is at MA level because of what you make it not because of the topic itself is because this whole course has a non-positivist approach. In other words there is not a secret cave of MA level AOLs that you can discover and mine. There is no existing AOL that is at MA level. It is what you do with the AOL that makes it.

I feel as people finish Module One they have this but Module One is not a closed event. Thinking about what you did and why- how things worked out for you is thinking about the theory that you meet in Module Two.

Sometimes we doubt ourselves even when we are in the middle of something but I feel that to some extent one has to be brave enough to not waste too much time on this.  We talked about this in the evening session also. Rilke writes so well about this in ‘Letters to a Young Poet.’

‘…I want to beg you, as much as I can dear sir, to be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers , which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything.’ p. 35

They ‘cannot be given’ you is not that they cannot be given because someone has them and will not hand them over. They ‘cannot be given’ because you already have them – they are already in you.

‘…Think, dear sir, of the world you carry within you, and call this thinking what you will; whether it be remembering your own childhood or yearning toward your own future – only be attentive to that which rises up in you and set it above everything that you observe about you. What goes on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love; you must somehow keep working at it and not lose too much time and too much courage in clarifying your attitude toward people.’ p.46

It is a kind of love that allows you to both not spend too much time considering yourself and doubting but also not too much time assuming you have a full grasp of everything.

As always we are not static in one defined thing we are in movement. We are not the AOL we are how we do the AOL - Going back to the ‘theory’ the perspective here is one is not looking for certainty because that impossible task has no grounding in lived experience , which is about change.

‘…consider yourself and your feeling right every time with regard to every such argumentation , discussion or introduction; if you are wrong after all, the natural growth of your inner life will lead you slowly and with time to other insights.’ p.29

The grace in this is when you consider your self ‘right’ do not consider yourself better. Just as you do not indulge in feeling less when someone does something that leads to a realisation and growth in you.  If we spend too much time on organising ourselves and others into being ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ we are stealing the movement of growth from the situation and statically switching from this (right) to that (wrong) instead of finding the artistry of change.

The dance is in the inbetweeness.

What do you think?

Adesola