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  • Michael Edmondson

How well do you walk through the fire?


Today is December 29 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is "How well do you walk through the fire?"

The fire is a representation of difficult times, extraordinary circumstances, and harsh conditions.

Fire is synonymous with chaos. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to get through life without experiencing some degree of fire.

Charles Bukowski was a 20th century American poet and writer who experienced a great deal of fire in his life. Bukowski was a prolific underground writer who used his poetry and prose to depict the depravity of urban life and the downtrodden in American society. A cult hero, Bukowski relied on experience, emotion, and imagination in his work, using direct language and violent and sexual imagery.

As one reviewer wrote “But few writers have made a more substantial career of acne-scars-and-all self-display than this tough-mouthed, tender-hearted laureate of the American bar, flophouse and racetrack.

In 37 books of relentlessly autobiographical verse and prose published before his death in 1994 -- and seven (and counting) published since -- Bukowski carved out a unique position in American letters.

He was a cult figure who disdained movements and followers, a working-class autodidact who dared to take himself seriously as a writer but who couldn't stop mocking himself as a subject.”

In his poem entitled “How Is Your Heart?” Bukowski wrote

during my worst times

on the park benches

in the jails or living with whores

I always had this certain contentment

I wouldn't call it happiness

it was more of an inner balance that settled for whatever was occurring

and it helped in the factories and when relationships went wrong with the girls

it helped through the wars and the hangovers the backalley fights the hospitals

to awaken in a cheap room in a strange city and pull up the shade-this was the craziest kind of contentment

and to walk across the floor to an old dresser with a cracked mirror- see myself, ugly, grinning at it all

what matters most is how well you walk through the fire.

How well do you walk through the fire? One example of life's fire is uncertainty.

Despite our best attempts to create certainty out of confusion, most of life remains uncertain.

Navigating the chaos requires being comfortable with some degree of uncertainty.

Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing wrote about this struggle in The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise “We must continue to struggle through our confusion, to insist on being human. Existence is a flame which constantly melts and recasts our theories.”

Why does each person struggle with being human?

Among the many reasons people struggle being human is the fact that we do not want to face ourselves as we are. Doing so creates fear.

And this fear makes us very uncomfortable.

As Jiddu Krishnamurti observed in his publication Freedom from the Known “we have to examine the network of escapes we have developed to rid ourselves of our fears. If the mind tried to overcome fear, to suppress it or control it, there is conflict and that conflict is a waste of energy. The movement from certainty to uncertainty is what I call fear.”

This insistence on being human, with its daily challenges of moving us from certainty to uncertainty, feeds the flame of existence.

The fire of existence creates chaos in our minds and burns for every person.

To be human, to move from certainty to uncertainty, and to recognize our fears demands that recognize what the 13th century Persian scholar Rumi noted “Most people guard against going into the fire, and so end up in it.”

Do you guard against going into the fire of the unknown? Do you resist going into the fire of what it means to be human, even if that involves having a difficult conversation?

As you go about your day, consider asking yourself "When the fire of life erupts do you walk towards it, figure out a way to extinguish it, and identify the cause of it so as to not erupt in the future? Or do you walk away from the fire, allowing it to burn out of control?"

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