Happenings

another post from the edges of the bell curve

This post is an edited excerpt from a longer post Disposition. Within that I tried to describe what I call happenings and wonder how they came about. I am using this ordinary word to mean a particular kind of expereince, those that happen to happen, making a deeper than usual connection with ‘not-me’ in the outside world, the world that isn't mine, unsought, unexpected, feels really alive for the time when it happens, and leaves traces that are remembered.

Think of everyday occurrences: actions. Imagine cooking, caring, playing tennis or football, gardening, anything. The activity can be done with a recipe, like an automaton with a blueprint, it might be an habitual activity, like brushing teeth, done by rote, thinking of something else in the day to come or the night just gone. OR, any activity can be done with attention to the physicality, the feel of the butter and the flour, meeting the eyes and caressing the body of the baby while the nappy is changed, the thwack of a ball in arms and feet, the smell of the soil, the taste of the toothpaste, fully sensing, often emotion may be present, sometimes reasoning is necessary, sometimes it lies dormant. My dentist recently suggested that my fairly healthy but aging teeth and gums might collect less plaque if I brushed with an electric toothbrush. So a rote activity for many years grooved into my unthought habit has gone, and I am for now paying attention to this new experience each morning.

I do not need to be analytically aware of notions like modes of attention. A happening can happen without thinking about it, but be known, internally. Emotionality and thought are as much a part of the activity as well as its physicality. Whatever we bring to any activity, be it love or impatience or sense of achievement, or duty or habit, we know the difference between recipe functioning and whole meeting. We also know that the latter kind of depth meeting, often wordless and sometimes even transcendent, is somehow ‘whole’. These happenings happen now and again, emerging within the melee of all our activities and experiences.

This is what I am calling happenings, different from just meeting, transacting or doing as has been done before. Happenings may occur when we attend in the way Iain McGilchrist calls presencing, or Bayo Akolomafe calls positioning. (I said inner disposition) They are never planned. Indeed the planning kind of approach to the world seems to block their emergence. There is no way of knowing if a happening will come, nor envisage what it will contain. Biologists (Robin Wall Kimmerer or RSPB) refer to going on a ‘foray’ - in any space without plan - to discover what is there. Poets copying the idea say they try a metaphoray. Any of us can try just being open to what might come. In ordinary language, "being friendly", "noticing", "listening" etc. might describe what brings a happening meeting with others, while paying attention, taking time to care with awareness brings activities like cooking or even housework and cleaning into being present to the value there. Chores remain chores, but are worthwhile, rather than burdens.

Ordinary activities are not trivial. Activities bring experience of body, mind and heart, together. Or not, as we can be inattentive, or compartmented. We can have a disposition to the emergence of what comes next, or a disposition more preoccupied with patterns of the past, touched by the recipe tried before, or even imprinted, following the blueprint already absorbed.

As I write this, I notice that a happening is always a connection beyond myself. Other very valuable ways to be, say imagining or hoping, preparing, do not come in to this experience, may block its occurrence just as much as planning or controlling does. There is no ranking or comparison being made, no judgement. Happenings can be both good or bad, happy or unhappy, as well as openness, they need willingness to witness.