Right, this is big. This really is what ‘it’ is all about. And when I say ‘it’ I really mean ‘it’ as in ‘everything’. But if we’re going to do this right, we’re going to have to back up and give you a bit of a lesson in behaviourism. That might sound dull but it really isn’t. Most people know nothing about behaviourism, or they know a little bit but what they know is wrong. That’s what it was like for me, anyway. My main mistake was believing the introductory psychology books that claimed that behaviourists were not interested in so-called ‘internal experiences’ like thoughts, feelings and urges because they could not be directly observed and were therefore outside the remit of science. Total rubbish! Rubbish that they can’t directly be observed and rubbish that behaviourism is not interested in these things. Burrhus Frederic Skinner, arguably the most famous behaviourist of them all, wrote an entire book called Verbal Behaviour that applied the principles of behaviour analysis to thinking and feeling as well as talking and writing. These days I know a fair bit about behaviourism although there’s a huge amount I still don’t know but that is cool because I love learning more stuff about things I am interested in. Happily all this qualifies me quite well for the task that I have set myself here: to explain what is meant by ‘appetitive learning’ and also what is meant by ‘aversive learning’ because you can’t really have one without the other.
My Perspective
Before we get into this, it’s important for me to say that although I am talking, here, in terms of explaining ‘things’, as if those ‘things’ – behaviourism, appetitive learning etc…- were fixed entities out there in the world in some kind of objectively true sort of way, that’s not how I ‘mean’ them. I am using words like ‘explaining’ and ‘things’ as if they were in inverted commas. From my perspective, what these words ‘mean’ are a function (see definition of ‘function’ coming up) of the unique relationship between me, as a behaving organism, and my context (see definition of ‘context’ coming up). The words have come to acquire that function by virtue of all the different occasions upon which I have interacted with them by saying them or reading them or thinking about them and their function will continue to evolve as I interact with them in new ways. For this reason it is entirely possible that another behaviourist with a different history of interactions with these words would take issue with some of my definitions. So, I would encourage you, rather than worrying about whether my ‘explanations’ are ‘correct’, to ask yourself whether they serve you in any meaningful way. I hope that what I am writing here will transform the way words like ‘behaviourism’ and ‘appetitive’ and ‘learning’ function (definitions coming up) for you in ways that you find helpful. My dream is that this ‘transformation of function’ will help you move into a relationship with the world which is more appetitive than the one you are in at the moment. In other ways, I am hoping that in some small way reading these words may help to change your life for the better.
Discriminating
So, before we can get into this we need to prepare the ground a bit. I need to teach you some ‘discriminations’. ‘Discriminations?’ I hear you say, ‘Aren’t they those bad things that refer to unfair treatment of human beings who find themselves subject to various forms of iniquity as a result of belonging to different groups (female, non-white, disabled, elderly etc…)?’ Well, sure, that’s how we usually use that word but this is behaviourism, so the word is working in a behaviouristic kind of way.
If I am discriminating, I am simply responding to two similar things differently. So racial discrimination is an example of this but so is a mushroom picker who picks a tasty mushroom and leaves the poisonous one untouched. Any kind of expertise involves discrimination. The more expert we are in a given field, the more subtle the discriminations we are able to make, the more things we are able to orient to and interact with and the richer our experience of the world.
So, although certain forms of discrimination can be bad, being able to discriminate is actually quite essential. If we responded to everything in the same way, our life would be very repetitive and we probably wouldn’t live for very long. Imagine if I responded to everything as if it were a donut. It would be fine whenever I encountered a donut but a real nuisance when I encountered a tree or a public convenience or a poisonous mushroom or an aeroplane. Life would be a near constant disappointment and ever so confusing. Thank goodness human beings are quite good at learning to discriminate!
Behaviour, Context & Function
I want you to be able to discriminate between these three words in a new way. Unless these words are completely new to you they will be working in some way for you at the moment.
BEHAVIOUR: When I say ‘behaviour’ you might think of other words like ‘parenting’ or ‘school’. You might have had some experiences when you were little of being praised or punished for ‘behaviour’ that was said to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’. But, when I say ‘behaviour’, you probably wouldn’t think of other words like thinking, feeling, imagining, and you probably would not be thinking of things like your heart pumping blood through your veins or your body digesting food. In the world of behaviourism, we use this word differently. Behaviourists, or at least so-called ‘radical behaviourists’ like B. F. Skinner, use the phrase ‘human behaviour’ to refer to EVERYTHING THAT THE HUMAN ORGANISM DOES. It doesn’t have to be things we can directly see. It doesn’t have to be stuff we do on purpose. It’s just everything we do. It probably feels odd to say that you are behaving just by virtue of your heart beating but according to this definition of behaviour you are; it’s one of the many things that the organism that is you is doing at any given moment.
If you think about what we said about discriminations becoming more refined the more expert we are, you will see that, at any given time, there are a potentially infinite number of things that the organism is doing. If we can respond to differently to things the organism is doing, then they are different behaviours. The closer we look, the more we see, as the British artist David Hockney memorably put it recently. An infinite number of behaviours feels a bit overwhelming, so in the definition of appetitive learning we build here, we are going to limit ourselves, pragmatically, to behaviours that we can directly observe (including behaviours like thinking and feeling) and that we want to influence in some way. This is what we will call behaviour.
CONTEXT: Quite simply context refers to everything that is not the behaving organism. Again you can see how this everything is potentially infinite. So, again, here, we are going to limit what we mean by ‘context’ in a pragmatic way by saying that context is everything that makes an observable difference to what a human organism does AND that we can manipulate in some way. So although, technically, a black hole in another galaxy might be context for all life on earth, we (or at least I) don’t know how to measure its influence on our behaviour and we (or at least I) can’t manipulate it in any way, so we’re not going to bother about it too much. Although it is quite fun to wonder what difference that black hole might make to my chances of making myself a satisfactory cup of coffee…
FUNCTION: This word is the magical place where it all happens. And again the meaning is simple. Function refers simply to the relationship between behaviour and context. To put it another way, if I am interested in the ‘function’ that a piece of behaviour has for its context, I am interested in what happens to the context when the behaviour occurs; for example, as I tap the keys of my computer (behaviour) I see that in my context my key tapping coincides with some words appearing on the screen of my laptop (context), so I can say that this is one of the functions that key tapping has for my context in this moment. Notice, I did not say that my key tapping ‘causes’ the words to appear on the screen of my laptop. We’re not describing some kind of linear causal process when we talk about function; we are simply observing ‘oh look, when I did this thing, on this unique occasion, this other thing happened at the same time – interesting!’ Function is always contextual which means that we are not looking to formulate absolute rules that pin down what the function of a particular action is definitively across all situations; we would not say something like ‘when Jacob taps the keys of his laptop words always appear on the screen’; my laptop may break down, run out of battery or I may be doing some key tapping which coincides with the appearance of numbers on the screen rather than words.
APPETITIVE v AVERSIVE: Now we are ready to learn to discriminate two different classes of function, that is two different kinds of relationship between behaviour and context.
If an organism is in an appetitive relationship with context then it is fully and flexibly in touch with context. Think of a field of bunny rabbits all hopping about in the sunshine; one moment they are eating grass, the next they are eyeing up a potential mate, now they are having a snooze – they are exploring, switching easily and fluidly from one delightful focus of attention to another, engaging with the world as it is, maybe even savouring their moment-by-moment experience. In the arena of human behaviour this exploring, engaging and savouring might be different in terms of its topography (how it looks) but its function (what it does) is the same; if I am meeting a new person and my relationship with this bit of context is appetitive then I will be showing interest by asking questions and attending and responding relevantly to their answers (exploring and engaging) and I will be tuning into and fully experiencing any pleasure the interaction evokes for me (savouring). If this person introduces me to another new person, I will be able to shift my attention to that new person and to begin exploring, engaging and savouring this bit of context as well before shifting back to the now more familiar person and exploring this territory more deeply. Everything I am doing is about being in contact with a wide range of different aspects of context, moving freely and intentionally from one place to another. My behavioural repertoire – all the behaviours I have access to in any given moment – is broad, flexible and growing. I am continuously learning to do new things. It’s important to point out that if we are learning appetitively, our experiences do not have to be lovely, they can be painful; what makes them appetitive is not their form, or topography (what they look like), but the functional relationship between context and behaviour. If I am curious about my pain and exploring it with my attention in a moment-by-moment way then I am learning appetitively and my behavioural repertoire is growing. There is a sense of ‘hmm, I am feeling interest or appreciation or enjoyment’ as the organism interacts with more and more aspects of its context. Fundamentally, when we are in a state of appetitive relations, we are accepting and interacting with our current context as it is not as we would wish it to be. Curiously, this engagement with the world as it is creates the potential for a radical transformation the world and how it functions for us. When one human being interacts with another human being as they are, not as they might wish them to be (less ‘why can’t you be more like me?’ and more ‘you are of interest to me with all your idiosyncratic quirks, I want to know you better’), contact is more likely to be experienced as authentic by both parties, creating an experience of genuine connection and an appetite for more. Out of that interaction, new behaviours are born.
If an organism is in an aversive relationship with context then it is trying not to be in contact with some aspect of context. Think of the field of bunny rabbits again but now imagine what happens when a fox is present. Now the only bit of context that the rabbit is sensitive to is the fox and the escape route. Functionally, everything else ceases to exist. The rabbit desperately wants to be some other place and is trying to get there as quickly as they can. In a human organism we might seek to avoid contact with feelings that some past experience evokes by trying to think about something else. We try to avoid contact with context by running, fighting or hiding, not literally usually but functionally; in the example given above, trying to think about something else is a way for the behaving human organism to run away from difficult feelings. When we are in this kind of relationship with context, our behavioural repertoire – all the behaviours we are able to access in any given moment – narrows and becomes rigid and inflexible. If we are learning aversively, we are learning by trying to escape or eliminate experiences that feel bad or that we fear may feel bad, often based on previous experience. Here, there is a sense of seeking to eliminate the experience or grinning and bearing it while it’s happening and looking forward to the experience of relief when it’s over. There is a feeling of a constraint, of there being no other way. Fundamentally, when we are in a state of aversive relations we are refusing to accept our current circumstances and working compulsively to be somewhere else or to force those circumstances into a new shape. Curiously, this style engagement with the world as we would wish it to be rather than as it is, even though it may result in some change of form (we may kill an adversary who would then be dead), is what guarantees that the world continues to function in the same way for us (adversaries continue to feel like adversaries even after we have killed one). We strenuously avoid interaction, and any contact we do experience is something to be endured. We learn very little as a result.
It is maybe important to add that all of this does not mean we cannot refuse to engage with some aspect of context and still be learning appetitively. It is function, not form, that is important here. If the refusal feels like a choice and if it is accompanied by an array of other readily accessible behaviours that also feel chosen, then it indicates an organism in an appetitive relationship with context. Take the refusal to conform with some demand imposed by context, maybe the demand that you betray your religious faith or participate in genocide, this refusal to engage is driven not by a sense of compulsion and fear, a desire to survive at all costs, but by a choice to stay true to something, regardless of the consequences that may follow. By the same token, an apparent decision to conform, does not need to indicate an aversive relationship with context, if it feels chosen, perhaps a strategic move chosen in order to begin to start a resistance movement under the noses of oppressors. There is not a sense here either that appetitive means ‘good’ and aversive means ‘bad’. It would be hard to judge a human being for wanting to survive at all costs. Sometimes mere survival is the best that we can do. Appetitive means not ‘good’ but love-inspired, intentional and expansive. Aversive means not ‘bad’ but fear-driven, automatic and restrictive.
WHY THIS MATTERS!
This perspective matters to me because it has helped me see some things that are currently ‘wrong’ (in a state of aversive relations) in my world and in the world at large, and to begin to feel my way towards a way to something ‘better’ (a state of appetitive relations), at the same time as experiencing a new joy and sense of purpose right where I am (more appetitive relations). If that sounds like someone who is about to repeat the tired old trope of history as a teleological narrative that ends with the arrival of utopia, and the end of evolution, don’t worry. I don’t think we are headed towards utopia or that evolution will ever stop. ‘Growth is good’ as Gordon Gekko did not say. ‘Greed’ on the other hand ‘is not good’ as Gordon Gekko also did not say. I am optimistic enough at least to hope that, as a species, we may be able to learn to live with each other in a way that is radically different from the greedy, acquisitive way most of us are conditioned to live now. This optimism is based not merely on hope but also on the direct, daily observation of the behaviour of human beings who, despite their cultural conditioning and despite – or maybe because of – having almost nothing, treat each other with kindness, respect and a near or actual selfless generosity.
We live in a world, particularly in the West, currently dominated by aversive functional relationships between behaving human organisms and context. A more laymen’s terms way of thinking about this is to say that, in the West, especially the economically neo-liberal West, behaviour tends to be driven by fear rather than love. (Technical point: the problem with this laymen’s language – ‘driven by fear’ – is that it locates behaviour inside the individual, creating the impression that a thing inside the person called fear causes the person to act in a particular way. If we buy into this, we are far less likely to look outside the person when considering where to focus our efforts to bring about change. According to our interbehavioral perspective (see page on interbehaviorism), linear causes like ‘fear’ are always constructs and, to the extent that we respond to them as if they were natural events (i.e. real existing things that we as organisms can have direct contact with) we lose touch with the actual complexity of the world). According to Thomas Hobbe’s Leviathan, an influential work of political theory, published in 1651, the modern state sprang into existence to protect the property of its citizens. In other words the main purpose of the state is not to cultivate anything but to keep a threat at bay, to allay the fear of the propertied that the propertyless might come along and grab their stuff. Its function is to fight anyone or anything who threatens the status quo. So, we can see the state itself as a kind of collective organism that is in a state of aversive relations with its context, a constant state of war with the propertyless and other competing states. Why it might be important to allay the fears of the propertied class might not be immediately obvious from this depiction of things. In so far as Hobbes attempts to answer this question it is by pointing to what would happen if there were no state; things, he says, would descend into a state of nature or anarchy (literally ‘lawlessness’) and life would become ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. This sounds terrible, doesn’t it? And like lots of terrible sounding things it is a construct. The state of nature that Hobbes’ describes doesn’t exist anywhere, it’s a bogeyman whose function seems to be, at least in part, to scare us into accepting the status quo as some kind of natural event, as just ‘the way things are’. What are the assumptions that this construct conceals? An important one is the assumption that the acquisition of property, and the accompanying division of the world into those who have property and whose who don’t, is ‘natural’. Instead of saying that the modern state protects the property of its citizens, we could say that the modern state protects itself, a system whose purpose is to cultivate the accumulation of property, (or to use the Marxist term, ‘capital’), the arbitrary division of a world that in reality belongs to no one into constructed ‘things’ (or ‘commodities’) that can then be bought and sold with the sole purpose of accumulating more artificially constructed stuff, more property. A corollary of the assumption that ‘property’ is ‘good’ (isn’t it funny the way we sometimes talk about our possessions as ‘goods’?), is the assumption that life in a state of nature would be bad. Although not spelt out this assumption seems to derive a lot of its power from the Christian construct of humans as innately sinful or ‘fallen’. Left to our own devices, our own natural inclinations, according to this construct, will lead us to tear each other limb from limb. We must be protected against this nightmare scenario by imposing ‘civilised’ laws on our fallen natures to keep our innate sinfulness in check. As the recent wonderful book by David Graeber & David Wengrow The Dawn Of Everything: A New History Of Everything powerfully demonstrates, there’s just no evidence for this. It is true that human beings have always been capable of doing awful things to each other but, if anything, this ability has been amplified rather than dialled down by the emergence of the modern state. Indeed, looking at the whole stretch of our history as a species, it is hard not to argue that the evolution of a modern state whose function appears largely to be to perpetuate the accumulation of property by a governing ‘elite’, has been an important factor in the creation of a world in which we now stand politically and ecologically on the verge of self-destruction. That we are, collectively, in a state of aversive relations with our context is further illustrated by the staggering context-insensitivity of our collective behaviour; despite clear evidence of the destructive and unsustainable impact of capitalist consumerism on the planet and those who inhabit it, we just keep going, saying that any other course of action is just ‘unrealistic’. We can do, and are doing, terrible things. But it is also true that, from the very start, we have also always been capable of enlightened cooperation, and this is also true of the ‘brutes’, our mammalian forbears, so maligned by Hobbes’ description of life in a state of nature. Animals kill and eat other animals AND they cooperate with each other in myriad ways. For the moment, things have gone the way they have gone for human beings. Perhaps, we will drive off the cliff and destroy ourselves completely, completing our destiny to exist as a brief experiment in the history of the universe, tragic and beautiful, a baleful warning against the hubris of attempting to exert control over the world. Maybe, it’s just too late to fundamentally change course before some total, definitive societal collapse. Or perhaps, out of the ashes of the coming apocalypse, will arise a phoenix of a new equitable society, based on love, not fear, sharing, cooperation and a harmonious, reciprocal, respectful relationship with the natural world, not division, competition and an arrogant relationship of dominance and unsustainable extraction of natural resources, appetitive not aversive functional relations. Or maybe it’s not too late, perhaps apocalypse can be avoided, perhaps humanity will wake up in the nick of time and fundamentally change course, arriving at the new equitable society through some collective act of enlightenment. Who knows? If the latter scenario does come to pass, it will require a widespread shift at multiple levels from aversive to appetitive functional relations.
What does this shift from aversive to appetitive look like. I am going to give you a personal example. A couple of years ago now it suddenly hit me that I would never read all the books I wanted to read. There were just too many books to read in the time I had left. Of course, if anyone had asked me before this if I was going to be able to read all the books I wanted to before I died, I would have known intellectually that the answer was ‘no’ but the difference now was that I actually felt the truth of this. We all learn that we are mortal when we are children but we often do not feel the truth of this until much later. Prior to this realisation I had been ploughing through the literary cannon as if I was trying to get to the end of something. I would read quickly and often quite superficially. The books sitting by my bedside would feel burdensome. There would be a sense of relief when I knocked another one off the list. There was a slightly addictive quality to my relationship with the books I had yet to read. It was as if I believed that, just around the corner was enlightenment, the next book would be ‘the one’, I was going finally to reach the promised land! But it never happened. I would finish a book and get a momentary burst of relief but not the lasting sense of peace and enlightenment that I craved. And then I would set off on the same trail again, slightly troubled by how repetitive this all felt but not troubled enough actually to try something new. Since my realisation, although it’s still possible for my book addiction to kick back in, my relationship to the books I have and haven’t read has fundamentally changed. You might think that the realisation would prompt me to speed up, to start trying to cram reading as many new books as possible into the shrinking period of time I imagine I have left. There is a pull in that direction. I do sometimes experience a craving for more books, more time. But that would still be a case of aversive relations, driven by a fear of missing out to consume more books, more quickly trying to blot out the impossibility of the task I am engaged in. But in my wiser moments I intentionally feel the limit of my mortality. I mourn the books I will never read (I don’t know their titles but I know they are potentially infinite in number), allow myself to feel this grief and to feel the craving and let it go. I have started to re-read books and I have also started to write. The books I do read, I read with greater attentiveness, and in my writing I am beginning to recognise the sound of my own voice emerging out of my interactions with the voices of the authors whose work I have read. It feels a little as if I had previously been speeding through the landscape of every book that has been written in a highspeed train, barely distinguishing one book from the next as they whipped past my window in a blur, whereas now, I am walking the same route, taking time to pause and savour the unique details of each text, occasionally leaving cairns, my own creations, as a sign that I once passed this way.
It is strange how very liberating the realisation that there is no escape from the limit of death can be. That bares repetition: accepting limits can be liberating. Throughout human history there has been a drive to escape or transcend death, and other natural limits, that in our myths and sacred texts, has always been recognised as a form of hubris, an arrogant assumption of godlike powers that violates some aspect of the natural order. I only discovered recently that the myth of Sisyphus falls into this category. I had been familiar with the story of a man fated to spend eternity in hell attempting and failing to push a boulder up a hill (failing because the weight of the boulder becomes too great and overwhelms him before he reaches the top) but I had not realised that this fate was punishment for twice tricking gods to let him live beyond his allotted time, most memorably when he tricked Thanatos, the god of death, into trapping himself in magic shackles, thereby (for a while) preventing anyone from dying. In contemporary Western culture, the drive to escape aging and death is stronger than ever, culminating (in the very wealthy at least) with a hubristic sense of entitlement to everlasting life; Larry Ellison, the second wealthiest person in the world, according to his Wikipedia entry, is quoted as having said that ‘death makes me very angry’ when explaining why he has spent hundreds of millions on anti-ageing research. This thinking is no longer at the margins; the ‘successful ageing’ industry is very much mainstream science, so much so that the physician co-author of Younger Next Year, was able to write that ‘the more I look at the science, the more it became clear to me that such ailments and deterioration [heart attacks, strokes, the common cancers, diabetes, most falls, fractures] are not a normal part of growing old. They are an outrage.’ Implicit in all of this is an idea that death, far from being an inevitable feature of the natural order of things, is simply evidence of a lack of effort, that if we were just willing to put the hours in, we wouldn’t have to die at all. As someone who works daily with the elderly, I can tell you that this idea has been so successfully marketed that when our bodies do begin to show signs of wear and tear, one of the most common emotions that people experience is not grief but shame, as if aging were the result of their own carelessness, not of a natural process, a cycle, in which, like it or not, we all participate from the moment we are born. The wider culture, far from doing anything to disabuse its elderly of this view, rather endorses it by removing them from their homes once they begin to need help and placing them in institutions, laughably also called ‘homes’, where they can die quickly and out of sight without reminding the world of the inconvenient truth that they represent – it might not be good for the morale of the workers, after all…If instead of expending huge amounts of effort on trying to escape the inescapable, raging against the limits so unfairly imposed on us by nature, if we were to accept these limits, accept that the inescapable is just that, we might find that we have more time and energy to devote to actual living, we might, in other words, move from an aversive to an appetitive relationship with context. Another related limit that it can be liberating to accept is the limit of irreversibility; once it is done, it’s done. ‘I should have, I could have’ is such a waste of time! But so many of us do it. I’ve spent half my life doing it and even now, at the grand old age of 51, I have not completely kicked the habit. What both these related limits require of us is that we let go of our addiction to the contemporary myth of individual free will, according to which human beings stand outside and above the natural world. We seem almost to have come to believe that with enough knowledge we will be able to bend the world to our will and create new worlds, like gods ourselves. But we did not create ourselves. We did not create the world which gives us food to eat, water to drink and air to breathe. We did not and we cannot create the rules that govern this mysterious experience of life we have all been given. All the things we have created have been possible only to the extent that we have discovered and learned to work with not against the laws that govern the natural order. We are participants in a natural order just like everything else. That said, before we completely dismiss that part of our nature that rages against limits, there are some limits that it is, in my view, our job as human beings to rage against – the limits that, driven by fear, we have created and imposed on ourselves that mean that every human being born into the world, is born into massive inequality in terms of the natural resources and basic rights they have access to. Right at the top of the list of these artificial limits is property, that construct according to which land that does not intrinsically ‘belong’ to anyone can be called ‘mine’. It is irresistible but ultimately futile to rail against natural laws – death, irreversibility – that have always and will always apply equally to everyone. It is entirely reasonable to rail against artificial laws – property and the laws that protect it – that are historic and contingent not universal and that entrench inequalities that we have created. This railing and raging is driven not by fear but, when it is on behalf of others, by love of justice and, when it is on behalf of us, by justified indignation, or love of life. If someone or something is trying to kill me, I have a natural right to defend myself. If someone is trying to take something from me that I have in my possession but do not need because they need it to survive, then I must either hide like a coward behind the artificial laws of a state whose purpose is to protect and entrench unequal access to natural resources, or I must hand it over with a smile and ask if there’s anything else I have that they might need. As I write this I confess that in this moment much of the time I am closer to the coward. Nearly every day, I walk passed people begging for change without stopping. I benefit materially in myriad ways from a global economic system that oppresses and exploits and, let’s say it how it is, kills huge swathes of the world’s population before their time, prevents them from achieving their potential for learning and growth. I participate knowingly in all of this. Am I really any ‘better’ than Germans, who knew it was wrong but were frightened of speaking out, and so just watched with a resigned shrug as the Jews walked into the gas chambers? I make excuses. I used the word ‘realistic’. I tell myself that it’s more complicated now, that handing over cash to those in need doesn’t necessarily do any good. Maybe so. But does that make it okay to do nothing? Not to reach out in any way? To stay in our artificial boxes, clinging to an illusory security and an equally illusory freedom. Is the resigned shrug morally superior to the convinced fanatic? Not for me. And this is personal. I am not telling you what you should think. I am not judging anyone either. It may be true in some objective way that the resigned Germans could not have acted in any other way. That they were doing the best they could. But, for me here now, it is the resigned shrug, the indifference, the ‘what difference would it make’ which enables those with power, and with hearts and souls either dead or in a coma with little prospect of waking, to perpetrate atrocities in the name of progress. I want to do better. Can’t we all do better? To the extent that we are able to cultivate an appetitive relationship with our context, this is where we end up. We do not run, fight or hide from the current context, we embrace all of it, lean into it, feel everything there is to be felt, the joy and the horror of it. We accept that if we want to be here at all, it can only be as a participant, not some kind of disinterested observer, there is no privileged position from which we can knowingly look down and objectively observe what’s going on. We accept that we cannot not be involved. We accept that our responses to our context irrevocably change that context, even when our response is one of indifference, the resigned shrug, the ‘what am I supposed to do?’ To the extent that we do accept all of this, the resigned shrugs that we justify as necessary to our survival, begin to feel, at best, like temporary respite from the storm of living but, at worst, if indulged in for too long, like actions that slowly suffocate our hearts, our souls; it begins to feel necessary to do not what feels prudent but what feels right, to act in line with the yearning for something better we feel in the face of injustice, to call out and resist, to act inspired not by fear but love. And to the extent that we do all of this, to the extent that we put our lives at risk, we feel, and actually are, more and more alive.
Yes To All Of It 