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January 16, 2009
Leaving Home
I don’t know anyone who hasn’t been upset by the pictures of the children in Gaza lying next to their dead parents for 4 days. I found myself identifying somehow although I have never experienced anything so terrible. It seemed to touch the most vulnerable and most hidden part of me – it’s not just that their parents are dead. God knows their orphaning is tragic enough. But when your world, your safety and your comfort are gone what else do you do? You stick with what you know even if what you know is no longer alive or there for you. Home is still your dead parents when the option is not known yet. And no-one had found them to scoop them up and help them take the first tentative steps in their new life. I know I do it every day in lesser ways, in relationships, in jobs, in ways of living. I hang on in there hoping against hope, because to get up and change or in some cases, leave/stop all that I know takes more courage than I think I have.
Last week on my retreat I was reading Clarissa Pinkola Estes commentary on the story of The Red Shoes in Women who Run with Wolves each morning. She writes of this experiment on dogs testing the “flight” instinct in humans in the 1960s. In the first experiment a dog is put in a cage and given shocks every time it went to the left – so it quickly learn to stay on the right. Then the shocks are changed to give it on the right – so it adapted and learnt to stay on the left. In the third, the dog was given random shocks all over the bottom of the cage – so no matter where it lay or walked, it would get a shock. The dog was confused at first and then panicked. Finally it gave up and lay down, taking the shocks as they came no longer trying to escape them. In the fourth experiment, the door was opened. The scientists expected the dog to get up and leave but it just lay there taking the random shocks. They concluded that when a creature is exposed to violence it will tend to adapt to it so that when the violence ceases its instinct to flee is hugely diminished.
I think this is true of any kind of habitual circumstance that prohibits growth and freedom – including the adaptions I developed and continue of my own making. Well that’s my little problem – and it seems quite a luxury compared to the children of Gaza – who keep haunting me.
Posted by Tess at January 16, 2009 02:01 PM