Unexamined Motivation Hazard
Hey beautiful people,
I am super excited to announce that we have a new practice in our wisdom gym: Embodiment Hour with Schuyler Brown!
Feeling is healing. Join Schuyler for an embodied discussion about a piece of current media or culture. We’ll practice working with somatic awareness and emotional intelligence to unpack how we’re really feeling about what’s going on right now. The space is open to all who wish to practice sensing and communicating feelings; to feel and be felt; to see and be seen.
These sessions are AWESOME. They are not to be missed if you are looking to step up (or in) your embodiment game. The sessions will be available to both patrons of The Stoa and Schuyler’s The Art of Emergence community. Sign up for Schuyler’s community newsletter here.
You can watch the very first Embodiment Hour session here:
Tomorrow’s events:
Collective Presencing. Every Tuesday @ 2:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Collective Journaling. Daily @ 8:00 AM ET. Patreon event. 90 mins.
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February 28th, 2022
The first draft of yesterday’s entry was originally clocking in around two thousand five hundred words. Something felt off about it though, so with the help of my editor, I cut it down to a little over a thousand words. My initial story of why something felt off was because I was doing too much in my first draft.
I still did not feel entirely good about the entry, but I sent it out to this mailing list anyway, only to edit out some parts after posting it. I do not know what the etiquette of editing parts out of my entries after posting them should be, but I do know I want to have the following hard rule here now: do not post an entry if something feels off about it. I do not want to be motivated to write here due to some nebulous pressure to write here. This of course brings me back to the never-ending confusion as to why I am writing here in the first place.
In my “Untying Existential Knots” entry last week I hand-waved away this confusion with the following sentiment: who gives a fuck why I am writing here, it’s the mystery, baby! I do sense there is some signal with this sentiment. A part of me is called to write here, and another part of me feels hesitant to do so. The hesitancy part is currently unexamined. I sense the move now is to honor the hesitancy, to write with it, and perhaps through it.
I was getting so much out of my private journals; so many insights were arriving, and the writing process had a certain coziness. I woke up every morning, made my espresso while Socrates rubs against my legs (or bites my ankles). I proceed to heat up some holy wood, then get to see all the beautiful faces that come to Collective Journalling. I have no record of my private journals, as I always delete them after writing them. I just journal for the insights and catharsis.
My private journals were becoming really heavy though. And dark. This is okay, as I am in a dark mood these days, which is understandable given what was happening here in Canada and in the world. Camille and I are ethnically Ukrainian, and seeing what is happening in Ukraine is pretty heavy for us. I imagine it is pretty heavy for everyone.
I am having a hard time sleeping these days, waking up around 2 AM the last two days, with a potent fear. My historic default mode kicks in: attempt to think away the fear, no doubt thanks to the overdeveloped think-away-the-fear muscle I’ve exercised over the years. My thinking last night kept turning to Putin putting Russia’s nuclear forces on alert. Russia has over six thousand nuclear weapons, with around a thousand and five hundred deployed.
Looking at Twitter, everyone seems to have stopped becoming an expert on all things COVID, and are now Russian foreign policy experts. As usual, there is no shortage of overt and covert “I am a good person” signaling, along with hot takes from intellectuals that convey messages like the following: “Putin is crazy and will nuke us anyway so let us attack him now.” Reading all of this is making me want to tweet scream and tell people to get off Twitter, when really I should just get off Twitter.
Tweet screaming is not going to help much anyway, except to vent and pass along my fears. My favorite recent tweet I came across was this one: The lounge-chair generals need to stop the warmongering… It's very easy to be ready to fight to the last Ukrainian and last Russian soldiers while waiting for your delivery from Whole Foods.
That resonates. I do not want to become a “lounge-chair general,” nor vent against them. I sense I will be of better service to the whole, my wife, and Socrates by feeling deeply into my fear, so I can own it. My default algorithm seems to be this: when my fear is unexamined I attempt to understand too much. This is probably the reason why I was having difficulty with yesterday’s entry. Fear was present in an unexamined way, motivating me in unseen ways.
It might be why I am having hesitancy writing here in general. Nick Bostrom coined a term I quite like: “information hazard,” the releasing of true information that can cause unexpected harm. I sense there is an adjacent phenomenon: “unexamined motivation hazard,” showing up in a way that is motivationally unexamined, passing along any unowned emotions to others, ultimately doing more harm than good.
I do not want to react with fear anymore, here or anywhere, by rushing to understand too much or attacking others whose fear-fueled understanding does not match my own. Instead, I want to honor my fear, directly be in a relationship with it, regardless of how intense it becomes.
I am called to be more responsible with my words, and I sense they need to be responsive – not reactive – to my fears.
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