A musician recently shared an expression with me, “God gave her a beautiful voice. Too bad he forgot the owner’s manual”. The idea that there could exist an owner’s manual for our gifts has captured my imagination in the days since that conversation. In keeping with my insatiable curiosity about the nature of human existence I am mining the potential of this human manual analogy.
How does the analogy of a personal owner’s manual play out? Is it written for us at birth or do WE write it. Is it a composition or a transcription? – our life’s work or a coded message for us to decipher? In my imagination, it is all of these things: a fantastical tome of byzantine complexity filled with sounds, images, dead leaves, buttons, scraps of childhood blankets, and of course, words: all personal clues to navigate everything from laundry to lovers’ spats. There are certainly things that are engraved in it’s pages such as propensities toward solitude or jealousy or earthiness… the ineffable qualities that make up our unique flavors. If we are students of our selves then there are, most certainly, things we wish to record as well but the recording of our own hard lessons learned seems to be permitted only in disappearing ink, by design. It’s a good design, I think, since we are not static beings. The book itself has about as much value as any work that has been edited every single day, presumably for decades, i.e. it’s a bit of a mess. No, it’s value does not lie in it’s completed artistic merit but in it’s aliveness – it’s organic, ever-changing nature.
We must study it’s newness daily, even if only with fingers on it’s covers or by leafing through it with closed eyes to smell this moment’s meaning. The choice to study and co-create this manual represents a choice to know our most intimate selves and, by doing so, understand our gifts. The embracing of our unique mixed-bag of strengths and weaknesses gives us the confidence to step up to the plate, to hear and then heed the call of our own potential, an admittedly frightening task.
The choice to study and co-create this manual also represents a path of service but don’t assume that I’m proposing we blindly follow a path of selfless service. I have a much harder path of service in mind for us to navigate, one of selfish service. Our language is lacking the perfect word since selfish has a negative connotation once its definition of seeking or concentrating on one’s own advantage, pleasure, or well-being is completed by the addition of with disregard for others. The brand of selfishness I’m advocating is one in which our personal resonance and dedication to our own fulfillment trumps all commitments, social conventions, and rules. I realize this has an Ayn-Randian ring to it but there are many ways to spin this guiding tenant of selfishness that lead to a personal joy and benefit to all that seem to be missing in Ms. Rand’s books. I suppose I’m advocating a more tantric spin on selfishness in which decisions are based on sensation, the feeling of what’s right in the moment. In tantra, movement, sensation, feeling, & emotion are some of our most powerful tools for transcendence. In this scenario, an action or inaction that is experienced as sensation (my heart just started pounding out of my chest), as opposed to story (that person should not have cut me off!), which in turn act as a guidance system of sorts. This first-person sensory approach to being human is not the exclusive domain of the tantrics. It is the investigation of subjective experience we find at the core of William James’ radical empiricism of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology.
We can sign on as a contributing editor to our own manual through the conscious choice of one of these first-person investigative practices: meditation, musical improvisation, psychoanalysis, hell, it can even be fly fishing. It all comes down to intention. Even the attention to which you devote to doing the dishes can bring you into the presence required to study your self through the senses. The reason we must practice during these uneventful and mundane moments of our lives is so that we are able to stay with the sensations of the tough stuff when it arises instead of being swept away in a storm of emotional patterning. As they say in the military, at times of crises one falls to the level of one’s training.
But what of it? Why should we learn to love the book of our selves, especially since it sounds like work? Good question since, in all likelihood, the work of editing the owner’s manual might give us insights into how we operate in the world and maybe even how we can better use our gifts, but it will say absolutely nothing about why we are here in the first place. The only reason I can come up with is to be happy or, if you wish to aim lower, at least to suffer less. By engaging each moment, whether it be through the breath, senses, or prayer we gain direct experience of the certainty that our human growth, through the fostering our gifts, is of the utmost importance, not just to our selves but to everyone we come in contact with. Over time, a practice of checking in with the senses leaks out of the contemplative space in which it began (a meditation cushion, a yoga mat, a climbing wall, a kirtan) and infuses each moment with ever-expanding awareness of the implications of one’s words & actions. The growing richness of your manual’s pages is simply what makes life so very enjoyable.
When we arrive at sufficient understanding and acceptance of both our neuroses and talents, there is an inevitable softening of the boundaries of self-hood and we become free to engage life with less fear of feeling foolish or different. Maybe we can even throw out the manual and trust that we already know what to do in this moment: that the answer to what? is listen, the answer to how? is yes, and the answer to why? is because it feels right.
