Growing up I was taught to think of myself as different to others, more or less, the qualities or quantities of others compared, scrutinised, analysed. Being "better" I understood as a quiet assertion of confidence, an adherence to values that made belonging to my family a source of pride, a core belief. Yet as an adult, I think of myself as never quite achieving, never the best or quite good enough, choosing comfort over achievement, politeness over wild enthusiasm, reserve.
Today, I put my hands into heavy layer of warm wet worm castings to find and remove the wrigglers who'd made their homes between eggshells not yet crushed, still slippery with membranes and the residue of egg white. Two years and the shells still not eaten or decomposed, it was time to clear the worm box, but these two years I've been unwilling to touch their little pink and grey soft bodies with my fingers, their tiny tapering lengths.
I understand that it is in human nature to experience emotions like fear and worry in advance of a challenging experience as survival strategy. And that the post-experience reflection will often be that the experience was not as we predicted, that the recall of the experience will be "not so bad after all". And that in fact we are deeply adaptive to new experiences. Today, to just get stuck in and do the job was freeing, excitingly so.
I could feel the heavy wet worm-made soil, scrape it from the plastic walls, catch the ends of individual retreating bodies as they plunged back into dark soil, and place them gently into ready vegetable peelings and damp newspaper. I explore the black, moist, crumbly, odourless castings like I am rubbing fat into flour, expecting smells that just aren't there. Nothing to be revolted by. It is all in my head. My pattern has been to avoid, to stay in fear and worry, adopting self-protection and self-saving as habit.What if this aversion to getting my hands dirty, a lifelong reserve, fear of risk, of messy relationships, of failure, sexual reluctance, saying what you mean, showing yourself, can be shifted with sensory practices, with the knowledge of trusting the senses, of not holding yourself as separate or different, of uninvolved, simply being like others, the same as, one of many. Ordinary. When I am ordinary, all things are possible. What if being no more than ordinary is the path to courage?
