Hannibal's Elephants, Dynamic Systems Theory and other Junk in my Trunk!

I am becoming whole - there is less baggage now! 

“Oh dear God, please, please just give me a sign!!” – after uttering these words in exasperation last night in the silence of the car on my way home, I found myself waiting – I’m not sure for what exactly.   I wasn’t waiting for a flashing neon sign to appear in the road ahead, to be struck by lightning or anticipating a booming voice to hand down some divine guidance. I sat there and felt the weight of the words in the  darkness of the car as I watched the rain and it occurred to me that we often ask for some sort of sign or metaphor to guide us but I wonder how often we miss the subtle signs and intuitive cues that present themselves to us every day.

How often does it happen that we miss them because we are looking for a shooting star to appear or waiting to be struck by lightning instead?  It is often in the mundane settings  and everyday activities of life that the most powerful insights can emerge.  In a sense the mundane becomes a vehicle for the sacred. But this only happens if we look inwards instead of upwards and outwards, waiting for something dramatic or wonderful to happen to alter the course of our lives.

It comes down to resonance.  You will instinctively know, if something touches you.  If you feel the tuning fork of your soul respond then you will know that there is something in it that speaks to something inside.  The metaphor of an archaeologist sprang to mind.  A bleary eyed, sunburnt dusty individual sifting through debris of hundreds of years until one small shard of pottery or flint resonates within them and opens the doors to discovery.  I think we are all archaeologists or prospectors of sorts. Isn’t that also true about our inner journey?  Are we not all sifting through the years and years of emotional debris and clutter to find a shard of something that is worth retaining?  The difficulty lies in knowing which shards to carry in our backpacks and which ones to discard.  I guess the key lies in resonance – if it is OF you or FOR you, you will feel your soul’s tuning fork answering and resounding in your heart because an element of  it has always been there archetypically and is responding to it.  The funny thing is that you cannot force resonance – it just happens.  It’s something that happens naturally, like the smile that some things or people always bring to your face.  It’s the resounding of your inner truth, when you find it or it finds you.  I guess some people think of the law of attraction here, but this is not it.  In terms of the law of attraction, you are trying to attract something which you do not have into your life.  Resonance, on the other hand, is an echo or ping on the radar of something that is already there, submerged in your soul.

At this stage of my life I am the archaeologist, sitting among the ruins and debris, sifting through all the bits, examining each piece of the jigsaw puzzle of my life, and either discarding it or dusting it and wrapping it in canvas, and putting it away for safe keeping.  I have not written for some time because I have had to take a significant step back and inward, evaluate who and what I am, where I am headed and who and what I want in life. 

Someone very close to me told me recently that I have “changed” somehow, that there is a hardness or an edge to me.  I construed it to be criticism at the time, but I think the hard edge is a protective measure, it’s not necessarily a bad thing.  I think it is important to toughen up – I have had to in the last few years – to try an prevent myself from bruising so easily.  I think that has been part of the growth process for me – letting go of my assumptions about how the world and the universe works and dealing with the emotional fall-out of the disillusionment born from my own naivety.   I think in our innocence we all assume that there is some mystical element of reciprocity at work in the universe.  But I have come to realise that I have been naïve – just because you do the best you can, and try to be a good person, it doesn’t mean that you will not find yourself like Job at any point in your life.  Shit happens to good people.   Similarly, just because you love someone with everything you possibly have to give, it doesn’t mean they will reciprocate. We cannot always control the course of events.  I think in the last few years, those illusions I had have been completely shattered and the main growth point that comes from it is that you are humbled because you realise that you cannot control everything.  On a personal level, I think I have had to let go of being a victim.  Growing up means taking responsibility for how you deal with what happens since you cannot control the events themselves.  I have come to realise that life is not necessarily a “problem to be solved” but rather a dance with a rhythm and steps that keep changing and becoming more and more intricate – kind of like Dynamic Systems Theory and the notion of complete interconnectedness.

Dynamic Systems Theory (DST) has been a fascinating read especially in terms of the application to language acquisition, but I see a deeper personal application value too.  DST is a branch of Mathematics which was originally about very simple systems such as the two coupled variables in a double pendulum.  Even though the system has only two interacting variables or degrees of freedom, the trajectory of the system is very complex.  When one applies this to a system that is inherently complex, where innumerable variables may have degrees of freedom, DST becomes the science of dynamic systems.  The calculations involved in DST is rather complex, but we don’t need to do the math to understand the principles behind it.  A dynamic system is characterised by what is called “complete interconnectedness” – in other words, where all variables are inter-related and changes in one variable will impact on all others that form part of it.  The point is that in a complex system, changes over time cannot necessarily be calculated or predicted exactly because the variables keep changing.  When mulling over this way past midnight recently, I thought this was rather analogous to life.  Little pebbles that are thrown into the pond at an early age sometimes lead to devastating tsunamis down the line.  You have no idea how significant the ramifications will be when you ignore you inner voice and move in the opposite direction.

Dynamic systems are also nested in the sense that every system is always part of another system.  When I read this I had a real A-HA! moment – I have always speculated about some sort of interconnectedness between things in life.  The same dynamic principles operate at all levels.  The interesting part is that sub-systems tend to develop so-called “attractor states” over time which are preferred but not necessarily predictable.  Scholars like De Bot, Lowie and Verspoor explain it as “the two different ways horses may run:  they either trot or gallop, but there seems to be no in between way of running”.  I wonder if we don’t operate like this on a sub-conscious  level too – although we all espouse to believe in shades of grey – I think all too often in life things are either really black or white – especially in emotional terms.  It is either something that makes you feel good and happy, or it isn’t;  it serves you or it doesn’t;  you are either committed or you aren’t  - you are either true to yourself or you aren’t.  The bugger is that we often tend to convince ourselves that there is an in-between twilight dimension which is in most cases just a way of justifying our self-defeating actions to ourselves.

If life and growth is a dance, we aim for interactional synchrony, that seamless understanding between partners that are attuned to the interactional process.  There are times when we step on each other’s toes or miss the beat, moments of a-synchrony.  But as DST follows, co-regulated interaction – mutually constructing meaning by finding the beat again, leads to the emergence of creative communicative behaviours in the context.  It is often exactly when you have stepped on each other’s toes, and have to stop for a moment before you find the rhythm again, that you find your authentic self – that ping on your soul’s radar. From my understanding, DST and pretty much life as I have found it, is about engagement and disengagement, synchrony and discord, breakdown and repair and all the bleeding, panting, teary, exhilirating and sweaty bits that go with it.

There are so many aspects of DST that I can apply to life as we live it, but one in particular struck me.  While reading research on grammatical development, I stumbled across Van Geert’s precursor model.  Basically, in a precursor model there are two variables, a predecessor and a successor.  Growth in the successor is initially suppressed by growth in the predecessor, which is a form of competition, until a threshold is reached.  After this, growth in both variables shares any of the logically possible relations defined by competition and support.  If one applies this to life – the present growth level depends on the previous growth level plus the interaction between that level and the resources available at that point. This is supported by the idea that life is always in some sort of flux.  Change is the only constant.  Like a dynamic system, we are in constant complex interaction with our environment and internal resources.  This produces what is referred to as self-organized equilibrium points, whose form and stability depend on the system’s constraints. 

In other words, life is going to get more and more complex as you go along, but the good news is that you will instinctively know when something resonates within you – when your inner tuning fork responds, to guide you to take “time out” to find your equilibrium again.  It seems to be a bit Darwinian to me – as a constant series of make-do solutions that work, given my abilities, inner capacity for it, goals and personal history – those bits of flint and shards of pottery that make up the inner archetypes.

We all seem to think that life is linear and that personal growth follows some predictable linear curve – I am beginning to thing that it is a lot more chaotic than the seemingly ordered sequence we think it to be.  But ironically – the chaos is part of the process.  I think the chaos itself is some sort of mystical alembic for creativity and dynamic tension.  This hard edge or edge of chaos, is a paradoxical state – a spinning top spiralling between order and chaos, a humming oscillation between these extremes demanding risk, exploration and experimentation. 

I have realised that I cannot find any relationship more evolved than the level of development I bring to it myself.    Life and living true to your Self – or living authentically – isn’t a gift.  It is a continuing struggle – a journey.  It takes a lot of pain and effort and a lot of digging and soul searching through years of debris to find that magical healing place and inner acceptance.  

Someone I love dearly asked me recently if I am authentic and if I really know how to enjoy life and have fun.  Aside from the implicit criticism and the hurt I felt at the time it seems to me that authenticity is not the same as simply “doing” something.  To “be” and to “do” are two different verbs. Your doing follows directly from your being.  I may force myself to “do” differently, but the inevitable dissonance will never bring happiness.  I think we should avoid making the same mistake Hannibal of Carthage made.  If we have flawed assumptions on which we base our actions and build our lives, the effects can be devastating.  Hannibal’s advisors convinced him that elephants were the perfect war animal but never told him that elephants will get spooked during battle and trample anything and anyone in their  path.  Hannibal disregarded counter advice and stubbornly clung to the initial advice and lost many men.  Our false assumptions undermine us like Hannibal’s elephants.  They get stuck in our own minds and we seem unable to get past them, even when they are trampling everyone and everything that is dear to us.  I have lived with the assumption that I am inherently unlovable for many years and have tried to compensate and earn love as a result through academic excellence, hard work, and trying to prove my value and that I deserve a place in the sun.  The more I succumbed to the pressure of being the ideal person – the more I was invalidating who I really am and affirming that I am inadequate as I am.  I have mentioned before that imperfection seems to be the desirable thing – it is precisely for my imperfections that I want to be loved.  

In my silence the last few months ,I have grown to understand that I do not need to be loved – not at the expense of my sense of Self.  I have grown to understand that everyone will eventually leave me – we are all in this on our own so it makes a lot more sense to learn to love who I am rather than try to meet someone else’s notion of who I ought to be.  I have taken a very hard look at life and at my self in the last few months and have taken some radical steps to clear away all the clutter.  

Aside from a radical physical transformation, I have been clearing the emotional debris too.  I am assessing all relationships in my life and discarding those which undermine my sense of self.  I have literally been getting rid of the junk in my trunk.  I have closed some doors, burned some bridges and cleared my space.   I drove past this banner at a construction site recently.  I felt the ping on my radar.  It is so apt.  It made my day, and I am choosing to believe that it is the one sign I have been looking for.  It just fits and my heart resonated with it completely.  

I have been stripping away all the non-essential bits and pieces to attain the gift of individuation. The gift is only attained from living a mindful journey, hearing the summons of your inner tuning fork – a heart resonance … I am happy at last. I can write my own story with wide eyed excitement for what the next chapter holds.  I just know it will be beautiful.