Confronting The Impasse

What do you do when you don’t know what to do?

Unless we spend our lives in a stupor, we inevitably reach a point of profound confusion. This isn’t merely the sort of confusion when you encounter something new for the first time. That’s a simple confusion, which resolves itself fairly rapidly.

There’s a much more challenging sort of confusion, sometimes called self-sustaining confusion, positive disintegration, or the impasse.

This is the sort of confusion where it seems that you don’t know anything about anything. The world seems to flip upside-down, and it’s difficult to find your bearings the way you typically would. It’s a painful sort of confusion. However, if you can move through it (pain and mess and all), it’s also one of the most growthful experiences of your life.

Let’s get a better sense of this phenomenon by exploring how this sort of confusion comes about in the first place.

The mind, when working well, does a wonderful job of bringing order to the apparent chaos of the world around us. We take in bits of information and organize them in more or less useful ways. In an ideal world this process unfolds in an organic way without causing us too much trouble. We might say that the fundamental property of mind is creative activity, organizing our thoughts and actions into ever-different configurations.

However, we run into problems when we impose upon ourselves certain “mechanisms” of thought (a term borrowed from the physicist David Bohm). These are rigid ideas that lodge into our minds and make it difficult to think and act in creative ways. A common mechanism we adopt is something like “Good boys/girls do such-and-such.” If we impose this thought on ourselves or have it imposed upon us, it creates a sort of frozen quality within the mind, a box into which we must fit ourselves.

A brief conversation with just about anybody will reveal a startling number of these rigidities, most obviously something like “That’s just the way it is” (as if total knowledge of anything was a possibility). “Should” is another easy one to spot.

It’s as if we don’t know how to act but mechanically. Perhaps it’s a result of the educational system. Maybe it’s a consequence of socialization. It could be intellectual laziness or existential cowardice. Who knows!

We can wonder at the causes and make our little judgements, but the truth is: these mechanisms work to a certain degree. They wouldn’t be so persistently ubiquitous if they didn’t. A way to think of it is a bit like Newtonian physics. We know now that the Newtonian models apply to a narrow set of conditions. Outside of that narrow range they result in confusion and poor fits with reality.

The mental mechanisms work similarly. They’re fine within a particular set of circumstances, but life will inevitably inconvenience us by breaking our models.

Now it’s worth mentioning that we become quite fond of our models, don’t we? We come to identify ourselves with our habits of action and perception. We derive a sense of security from them. We forget that we are separate from the mechanisms, and in forgetting we shrink and harden ourselves and the world around us. It’s this over-identification with the mechanisms that causes problems.

(For what it’s worth, if this all seems a bit far-fetched, come back to this article in a few years or decades when things go boom)

We’re particularly prone to falling for these mechanisms when we’re unsure of ourselves. Anxiety craves security. We may decide we want a shortcut, end up trying on some mechanical thing (like a business plan, a diet, a workout regimen…anything we take part in without actively figuring it out ourselves) and find that it “fits” for a time. It doesn’t cause any problems and in fact seems to be working quite well! So we adopt it as a part of our identity.

And yet it’s a foreign entity, a bit like an antigen.

It’s something we’ve consumed, swallowing it whole. It’s not something that we’ve generated through our own creative wriggling and squirming. It’s not something in which we have much sense of agency. We passively cart this thing around, going through its motions whenever it’s convenient.

We may have any number of these mechanical processes intermingling quite happily at any given point. Sadly, most people don’t have much personality beyond these mechanisms, and yet they get along well enough in life (for a time).

As I mentioned earlier life has a way of thwarting the mechanisms. It becomes problematic of its own accord because life tends toward muddles. It gets messy by default, and as effective as those mechanisms can be when the road is smooth, they’re not so useful when it gets bumpy.

It’s at that point that we’re called to wake up the sleepy creative faculty of the mind. It’s then that we’re asked to make something of the mess we find ourselves in. Then — right when we don’t know what to do any longer — we’re faced with a choice, and that choice will either shrink or enlarge our world.

One option is to stick our heads in the sand. It’s a tempting choice because again, anxiety craves security, and retreating toward what’s known seems like a safe bet. However, if the tide is already creeping up the shore, it’s not long before that sand castle crumbles (forgive the jumbling of metaphors).

Clearly that option shrinks the world. It reduces the scope of what we’re able to handle. It erodes our sense of self and reminds us that the world is a dangerous place.

The other option is much, much more difficult.

I can’t quite describe what that option requires because it will vary situation to situation, and yet we can be damn sure that it involves stretching ourselves in ways we never have before. It will invite us to muster up our internal resources in ways that feel new. It will not lend itself to neat, tidy answers — not yet. It will involve looking around at the pieces of broken down mechanisms and asking how they could possibly fit together, knowing full well that there’s no longer a how-to guide.

This is what makes these periods so significant for our growth.

We’re brought to a point where we shift from a reliance on the world to take care of us to the point where we take care of ourselves. Our locus of support shifts inward. We realize our parents aren’t there to kiss our boo-boos, the gurus are just as confused as we are, and we have the responsibility of sorting some shit out that we’ve let pile up for far too long.

The impasse isn’t pretty.

It requires care and courage.

And yet you can take hope in the fact that if you can perceive it, there’s something within you that’s capable of facing it and making it through to the other side.

Originally published on The Ecosomatics Institute Blog