DARKNESS + THE UNKNOWN
It's no surprise to those who know me that I am quite comfortable with the unknown and uncertainties of life. As I've long been dwelling in liminal spaces and the Mystery of Life, which certainly seems like society is - sooner rather than later - seeking to eliminate.
In our collective psyches the darkness is perceived as a place to fear and steer away from, back into the constricted arms of what's measurable, quantifiable, known and "safe".
Indeed, even our dictionaries describe "In the Dark" as being unaware, uninformed, unenlightened, oblivious and ignorant, so it's truly no surprise that at the level of language - in English anyway- that darkness cannot mean anything else like a magical, mystical, mysterious a place of unbecoming or from an artist's perspective as a fertile place of infinite potential and possibilities for creativity.
Greeks embrace this with a specific positive word - Aporia - which is a conundrum or state of puzzlement. It is a declaration of doubt, made for rhetorical purpose and often faked.
Valerie Kaur - an activist, writer and mother promisingly describes the choice we have to see darkness differently. She talks about the darkness of the tomb - death - or darkness of the womb; the ripe and fertile place where we birth; and the exact point where humanity currently finds itself. Indeed darkness - a necessary and complimentary part of light - needs some reframing and new language around it, it needs to stop being seen as painful, bad and wrong if we are to embrace it and step into it in this challenging yet excitingly dark phase of humanity right now.
My own experience of darkness started with my push into the void of it when I was a child and my mother passed away, causing myself and my brother to spiral deeply into the dark cave of the unknown and uncertainty for a good decade or two. Admittedly I got lost in it, becoming invisible and broken for many years until I chose to leave Australia to seek some certainty - or so I thought - by travelling to Germany.
As it turns out I began to choose to get lost deliberately as I travelled around Europe in 2005 - one of the best years of my life - from city to city with just a small map of the relevant Eurail train station route to my hostel, while the rest of the city was left largely unknown. Navigating new cities with no maps forced me out of my comfort zones and into the wider world away from boundaries of what I had known, hearing new languages, tasting new funny looking foods, and coming face to face often spontaneously with an explosion of warm purple - orange -pink sunsets screaming from the sky look at me! Indeed, the best experiences I've ever had in my life was without a map, money, people or plan. Another joy of diving into the unknown is the lack of expectation, which to my risk assessing/ avoiding friends is a waking nightmare.
When u have no plans, you have no expectations then you can only BE pleasantly surprised. Though those on the flip side of fear, cannot factor in surprise and can only imagine doom n gloom when the unknown is embarked on.
From living most of my life without guidance from caregivers and learning to fend for myself, I am more comfortable with risk taking than with health and safety - which I do obey for work; when they make sense and protect those I'm protecting and serving. But I do see why/ how most people don't operate within the same framework - or lack thereof - that I do.
I feel I can see in the dark after many years residing in it and now actually prefer it to the harsh neon lights of this measured, quantified ‘SAFE’ world of the West.
However, there is another factor to this inability to embrace the unknown or wander eyes wide open into darkness - and that is the privilege of Comfort.
In the west we have many comforts, I should know; from my comfy, soft orthopaedic mattress to my spacious warm bedroom where I can swing a cat or cartwheel if I choose to - to my £3 coffee at lunchtime to my thick cosy heavy sheepskin jacket - to the plethora of green spaces I can choose to run (or skip) around in to clear my head and on and on. We have it all, all those cosy cushy, creature comforts of life in the West that we get so damn attached to and cannot live without for fear of a fight with our egos. When others across the pond have much less than this, yet are often much happier.
Don't get me wrong; comfort is a beautiful thing, as a bodyworker I know the importance of comfort to feel safe and settle our nervous systems to keep us self - regulated.
HOWEVER those comforts also come with the Comforts of Consumption programming by the people who sell us this shit and keep us in this loop of not enoughness. We never truly need to give things up, instead only tiny sacrifices or life edits are made in the name of progress. But when do we ever get truly uncomfortable enough to question all of it.. This whole LIE we living, I mean LIFE we living.
Most of us don't need to! Thats the privilege of comfort that comes with being a wealthy westerner. We are too wrapped up in the layers and layers of our comforts to even need to start to unravel and wander out into the cold without our sheepskin jackets and see those who live without the mattress, the warm spacious room, the coffee at lunch and who can't see the green spaces because they're just trying not to die. And aren't we all?
Ultimately that's the truth of it ALL. We are all just trying desperately to avoid Death, the ONE thing that's inevitable in this Illusory world, the one thing that we fear is that Darkness will take us to, is ultimately our own deaths. That's what this whole 2 years has been about..Avoiding death because Westerners with our fat bellies and even fatter egos cannot fathom ever not being in these bodies, yet we live our entire lives avoidance of actually BEING in our bodies anyway, which is the ultimate parody of it all..
So when I talk about Darkness I'm truly talking about the darkness within us, the deep discomforts we haven't needed to dive into because it doesn't feel NICE, and because we actually don't have to. So, we continue to distract, consume, eat or love and light our discomfort feelings away until the next time it arises.
Resmaa Manken talks about 2 types of pain on the healing journey - Clean pain and Dirty Pain
Clean pain is where you go straight to the source of your stuff - core wound- its often called, get to the truth of it all, even if it hurts and deal with the pain through where it lives in the body, rather than gaslighting and avoidance strategies of Dirty pain, too easily and often utilised in the Yoga/ Wellness woke world adn what the majority of us have been advised or conditioned to do; treat the symptoms by numbing or taking a pill to ease the pain.
If every single human being explored the shadows and darkness within them and got to a place where the pain doesn't plague us daily - a New earth would truly be birthed. Our desperate need for certainty and safe world of the known is what's hindering the growth of humanity as a whole. If we could just shift our boundaries daily, by sitting with our discomfort, by walking down a new street to work, having coffee in a different cafe or moving our bodies in a totally new way daily then we are moving into the possibility of diving deeper into the darkness of the Unknown where all the magic and mystery lives…
Remember Mystery and Magic? Fast and Furious? And FUN?
Why does everything have to be safe, measured and known anyway?
Is that even really possible?
Who wants a world where everything is Known and predictable anwyay?
So next time you have the opportunity to get lost, GO; to sit with uncertainty ; SIT, to dance in the unknown, DANCE! Please dive into your own darkness, as what’s in the shadow is just hidden, it’s not always BAD or opposite the light, right? I promise that once you accept the discomfort, which IS painful, it shifts, and after the pain there is a renewed sense of you as wider and deeper, as your boundaries have expanded.
Then you will feel much more free in your skin and a whole new world opens up..
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