Learning: Life Work Balance and Dealing with Fear

I sat in Tilley’s today.

It was a summer autumn day.

I was reading the wonderfully useful “Exceeding Expectations” by Susan Kovalik and Karen Olsen. Chapter 2 on “The Bodybrain Partnership – Emotion and Movement”.

This is a very effective book of instruction for those interested in helping others learn.

I mused on meeting its author's Susan and Karen with Sally on a similar sunny day 3 years ago in Seattle.

Tilley’s is a true Canberra, Australian delight.

One sits on the sidewalk in that all encompassing way of being familiar to visitors and patrons of the Cafés of Vienna, Paris, New York, Toronto, Buenos Aires, Melbourne and oh so occasionally London. One is simply comfortable.

The sun gentle caressed all in perfect balance with the slightest of breezes. Around I heard the clink of spoons on saucers and the murmur of humanity at ease. The sound system played Ella and Piaf. Across the street, a tree, draped in its yellow golden autumn bloom, held firm to its leaves. A grey haired man on monocycle flitted past on his own path to “The Way”.

I was relaxed, happily invigorated by my bicycle journey to this special place in the world. I bathed in thoughtful joy from the evening before, Balboa then Battlefield 2 till late. Dancing and computerised war fighting, movement and human connection, actual and virtual, combined in one lovely evening.

Balboa is the ultimate partner dance a conversation in gravity with the comfort, security and proximity of the opposite sex sweetly bound by fear of rejection. This is in stark contrast to Battlefield’s simulation of the discomfort and insecurity born of the havoc, and brutally loud sounds, of war with all the possibility of death and mutalation only modulated by wonderful comradeship with no fear that it will ever be lost. Partners who have been in each others arms move on and do. Soldiers who have been in arms together move on and do not.

These feelings flitting into thoughts were confirmed, denied and were, all at the same time, there in what I read and felt

Women know the real human pay-off to comfort and feelings of security. Tilly Devine, a Melbourne prostitute, was well respected with good reason. She knew where she was on, “The Way”. She truly “got it”. She did not try to name it. She merely was on it.

Tilley’s is such a place now. It was conceived exclusively for gay women. It now embraces that delightful lie of inclusivity women alone orchestrate to maintain their exclusivity, the home. My “Divine Caesar Salad” was all that. More. The caringly chosen wooded Chardonnay I drank harmonised well with the female chef’s use of her available palette to satisfy my eye and pallet with texture, flavour and piquancy. Piaf sang “Au Coin de La Rue”. Unstated pleasure, being.

There is no doubt in my mind that life without movement and change is not life but Kovick and Olsen’s words of instruction hung in the afternoon air true, false and validated by what I saw, felt, tasted, thought and remembered.

Human reality on “The Way” cannot evolve in an atmosphere free of physical fear of havoc, death, rape or abuse. Ask the men and women of Banda Aceh, Pucket, Pakistani Kashmir, New Orleans, Rwanda, West Africa or the Balkans? Humanity has to manage fear. It cannot be avoided. Making humanity more humane, if we could or should, would only make half the above go away. This could be a good thing but there remains a need to know how to handle reality and the fear in it. It cannot be ignored, avoided or managed away. Much of it is in our souls. Fear and insecurity, we do not learn to manage, will obliterate our capacity to think calmly when we need to for our own, and other’s, life sake.

Insecurity in our physical well being is no worse or better to us emotionally than our fear of rejection by the Universe or those we hope love us The lie of security we will all buy whither it is offered by a Master Drill Sergeant in the US Marine Corp or a prostitute in a well appointed brothel in Melbourne. The first prepares us for reality the other to find our dreams.

Few of us deal with such extreme manifestations of our human condition. “The Way” and the Universe do not give us choice in this however. Susan and Karen rightly tell us that as teacher’s, especially of the young we should offer our pupils choices in a secure environment. True but will we then be able to make the right choice in a very insecure environment. If we have the choice I am sure we would all choose Tilly Devine’s path on, “The Way” however the Marine Corp Sergeant’s path offers a real life skill, managing fear, that hopefully we will rarely need but when we do will matters to us greatly.