Subtlety, Intimacy, Motivation XI

Equanimity, responsiveness, appreciation rather than tolerance, and an unflagging certainty in oneself combine to make up the next major cultural step after openness to diversity and tolerance of difference. Tolerance is certainly better than domination or warfare, but I've yet to meet a human being who wants to be tolerated. I've also yet to meet someone who enjoys being around people they can tolerate at best. Lastly, I have not met anyone who doesn't want to enjoy themselves, so being tolerated and tolerating may be a lesser of evils (much, much lesser in some cases), but it still won't float your boat. This is a big part of why I emphasize appreciation. Tolerance is a huge step beyond cultural hubris or xenophobia; appreciation is the next step. Actually being willing and able to appreciate strange and sometimes incredibly frustrating folks comes from mindfulness. So I try to avoid speaking of mindfulness as if it happens outside of social situations. I try to speak of mindful appreciation.

Equanimity is a huge part of mindful awareness. And so, I talk about relaxation (which is like low-level or immature equanimity) as being basic to mindfulness. If we try to relax but are only able to do so when we feel sleepy or exhausted or intoxicated, we'll have trouble concentrating. So being wakeful enough to concentrate is basic to intentional relaxation.

Mindfulness can be understood as an intentional and proportional balance between concentration and relaxation (although this is only way one, and far from perfect, of understanding mindfulness). If we include emotions in mindfulness practice, we will be unable to avoid our basic and healthy desire for appreciation of and from others. I'll sometimes tolerate tolerance, but I appreciate appreciation. Without equanimity and mindfulness, though, emphasizing appreciation may just lead us to stick with our social cliques. Rather than continuing to increase our ability to appreciate, we might then limit ourselves to activities or people we already enjoy. So I look for and work towards mature appreciation, mindful appreciation. Mindful appreciation of one's humanity and humanity in general allows us to get beyond personal preferences, different perspectives, and different positionings within various power analyses.

Maintaining mindful appreciation of oneself and others is largely dependent on being responsive--that's perhaps best left for another post. There are common individual abilities and attitudes that feed into responsiveness as well as common agreements or understandings or assumptions that must be accepted (at least provisionally).

The last item that I listed here--an unflagging certainty in oneself--may seem less expected to some folks. Mindfulness (as it's most often been introduced in America) and unflagging certainty in oneself may appear to work in opposing directions, but this is only in appearance or from a limited perspective. If we do not include mindful appreciation and equanimity in how we understand cultural and personal differences, then unflagging certainty just comes out as arrogance and demand--aggressive narcissism. I do not recommend aggressive narcissism. But IF we consider including responsiveness, equanimity, and mindful appreciation in our diversity, AND then we en-gender our considerations of cultural interactions, feminism has something really interesting to add. (When it doesn't include appreciation, feminism is often just as nasty, backwards, and limited as patriarchy; again, I am not for aggressive narcissism with one type of genitals or another, but Narcissus was a male and I think we should talk about that.) In the interest of being able to address a potentially international audience without being kicked out of bed tonight, I think I need to include gender relations, love, and masculinity in what I have to say on subtlety, intimacy, and motivation. Without being able to speak from a masculine perspective, I have little motivation to speak.