The world seems to speed up with each passing day. Spiritual teacher and activist Joanna Macy calls this current era “The Great Quickening,” and it is manifesting in very literal ways.
In my own life, I am juggling many different pieces—running women’s circles, working with private clients, launching a women’s summit, recording a CD, performing sacred music, finishing up my doctorate, planting veggies in the garden for our summer harvest, and somewhere in there finding time to maintain my relationships and commune with my cat! As I compare notes with friends and colleagues, I find this multi-tasking lifestyle to be the norm.
A couple of weeks ago, my husband Stephen and I took a walk to the beach. He’d just finished interviewing Angeles Arrien as part of his Sacred Awakening teleseries, and we were discussing her insights. She recommends spending some time each night digesting and integrating your experience of the day by asking yourself a few key questions from Spinoza. “Who or what at inspired me today? Who or what challenged/stretched me today? What surprised me today? Where was I touched and moved today?” Angeles asserts that only those experiences that are fully metabolized build character, which in turn is essential for wisdom.
This idea of taking time to metabolize our life seems simple enough. But how often do we really do it? As I move through my own life at lightning speed, I often just move on to the next thing without fully integrating the last experience. And I see the ways that I cheat myself of the chance to turn those golden nuggets of experience into life wisdom.
One example for me was my trip over a year ago to the Democratic Republic of Congo. I was invited to work with an organization doing innovative programs using theater as a vehicle for social change. Fascinated, I went to learn their model, and then travel to Angola to teach villagers how to use this system as a pathway for resolving conflict.
Needless to say, it was quite an intense trip. The war-torn Congo and the ways that women are being sexually assaulted as part of the war strategy is heart wrenching. I spent time working with teenage girls living at the Panzi hospital. One of these girls had been held by the rebel soldiers as a sex-slave for a number of years before escaping, and her female organs were so mutilated that she needed to be surgically stitched back together (which was actually quite common at the hospital).
While working in Angola, a colleague was kidnapped by a group of men with machine guns from her office while I was out working in the field. The situation was complicated, and it likely involved disgruntled employees. So it was unclear who could be trusted within our network. I felt like I was living in sort of science fiction novel.
But after this wild stint in Africa, I returned home to the onslaught of Christmas, relatives, and the energy of the American holiday season. Much of my whole Africa experience, which was wonderful on many levels, but shocking on others, was conveniently swept under the rug.
In retrospect, now I realize that I didn’t take time to fully metabolize my experiences in Africa. And there was truly a lot that I needed to integrate. But I allowed myself to be distracted with holiday plans, travel, with my new initiatives, and with daily life.
I think that I was truthfully a bit shell-shocked by the realities facing the Congolese women. The stories I heard were so extreme that it was hard to want to review all the details and to take the steps needed to integrate it. It was a lot easier to just shut the lid on the experience and move on. But that’s clearly not how wisdom grows. Instead, it comes from the willingness to go back into the pain points and breathe all the way through it.
