What do you do when the thing that is taking up most of your head-space is not your story to tell? Do you ignore it? Do you repeat from your own perspective? What, actually, does it mean to bear witness to someone else’s pain?
I’m thinking about this because I’ve been doing a lot of it. Especially over the last two weeks because of a culminating event, but actually over the last maybe three years. I’m also recognising that the notion of a culmination suggestions that it’s all over, when of course it isn’t.
The story doesn’t stop when the author types ‘the end’. The surviving characters walk off centre stage and have to carry on with the unwritten script for what happens next. Something always happens next, and the first next things carry the ripples of what went before, maybe all the next things carry those diminishing ripples. Maybe not. It’s different for all of us.
What do you do?
Perhaps start from recognising that ‘bearing witness’ is not the same as ‘giving testimony’. We are absolutely not under oath to speak all of our truth all of the time. Perhaps only share as much of the story as actually does impact on you personally, and only with the people who need to know in order to understand how you are feeling and reacting if that impinges on their interactions with you.
Perhaps as far as the rest of the world is concerned, then it is not your story to tell. Don’t diminish some-one else’s pain to gossip.
I often think that it is useful to focus on the very words we use. We deploy them blithely without really pondering the depth of meaning. Bearing witness. Bearing it, carrying the weight of it.
That’s what we need to find the way to do. Carry the weight of what we see and feel, and when it is the pain of others, it is about lifting some of that burden from them, being the safe space they can put their own emotions, processing, questioning, or whatever it may be. It goes beyond simple acknowledgement of the “I know you feel bad right now, but…” variety. It steps into “I will hold a little of this for you.” It is the simple seeing and hearing and holding, and not remotely trying to change or fix anything.
Simple.
As I say so often: simple is not the same as easy.
The reason that we want to talk about what other people are going through, the pain we are bearing witness to, is because we do not want to bear it. We want to pass on some of that pain to others. We are, in effect, in our turn, saying, “I can’t handle this, can I give you a share of it?” If we genuinely cannot handle it, then maybe that’s a fair response, but to truly bear witness means that first we should test our own ability to carry the burden we have been entrusted with and to be careful and limited with how much of it we try to shirk.
Because we have been given a sacred trust. When you are the first person someone shares something with, do not under-estimate how much trust they are putting in you. Often we're receiving a message that they may not be able to repeat, certainly not in the same broken-open manner. We do well to think how we honour that trust.
So what do I do?
On this occasion, I shared with the people who need to know how much I feel the weight of it. Not so that they can take that from me, but so they know that I am carrying it. For me, for now, that is enough.
Then I do everything I can to come back to my own centre and focus.
I come back to reading, writing, working out. I come back to digging my over-weeded flower-beds.
Above all I come back to walking.
There’s a wonderful line in Ryan Holiday’s book The Daily Stoic, appropriately enough for today’s date, in which he says, “enjoy your relaxation like a poet – not idly, but actively, observing the world
around you, taking it all in, better understanding your place in the universe.”
Enjoy the world like a poet. Walk like a poet. Not idly, but actively. I love that!
I go for a walk. It’s part of my current get-fit programme, this daily walking thing, but where & how I walk shifts day to day. Today is a Sunday, and a stoic has told me to go walk like a poet, so I pick up my camera, and will regret not packing the notebook (some poet I am!) and I walk.
I walk to bear witness to other things, the small things, the living world that most of the people I pass this beautiful autumnal Sunday morning are not witnessing, not even seeing in their passing-by. I walk to remind myself that bearing witness to beauty is a lightening of the load of the other kind. Perhaps there is such a thing as the un-bearing witness, the baring witness, where we tell the trees, the pools, the light, the unexpected late flowering plants, that we see them and delight in them and they, in exchange, see us and lift a little from us.
Perhaps when we walk into nature, even city street nature, campus nature, Victorian park nature, we are looking to see and equally to be seen. Perhaps every time I pass my favourite oak and echo the words of the song "I behold you, beautiful one; I behold you child of the earth and the sun…" perhaps I am asking the oak to behold me too…to hold a part of me that I would release if I could.
Perhaps the oak says yes. Perhaps the river takes a fractal. Perhaps the grass and the sky and scampering squirrels…perhaps there were five magpies to remind me of silver and the richness of my life as it is.
I walked down to the river. I felt the dew on my feet, and later the sand, and had to scrub my toes and soles clean when I got home. Perhaps it is too late in the year to still be sandals. I noticed where the recent rain had thrown everything into an out-of-season spring growth. I noticed how low the river is yet; there are beaches where I am used to floods.
I walked through the woods. The first leaves turning and falling. The light shimmers. There is a post drought, post rain, scent that is not petrichor but has a damp undertone of wet wood and dry leaf. No abundance of fruiting fungi yet. The footpaths are a crunch of cobnuts and spiky chestnut casings.
I walked alongside the lake, where reeds still calligraph unknown messages. The grey heron waiting patiently, ignoring the squall of gulls all around him.
I walked up through the park. There are tents down near the roadside hedge. Homeless people doing the best they can. I see no-one. I see pillows set out in a patch of sunlight. I think of all the others who have slept out this last season with no other option. Were they grateful for the warmth, or was the drought another challenge? Or both. I give these particular tent dwellers the benefit of the privacy they have clearly sought and take the higher path. I follow the edge of the wood, skirt the pitch & putt, hear the laughter of youngsters on the skate park, dodge the runners, wonder about those who choose to walk outside while still plugged into the technical dominance of their world.
I walked home through the streets that remind me of how lucky I am to live where I do, and have the life that I have.
Bearing witness can be hard at times and we need all our strength to do that, but it helps to remember the other side of the equation. The side where witnessing simply means noticing and carries no weight at all. Let the trees, and the river, and the pools,and other people’s gardens, and flowers, and doors – am I the only person who takes a delight in doorways? – wherever you find beauty, something simply pleasing to your eye, even if it’s a mad lion pot on a gatepost with plastic
flowers for a mane – love it, really see it and feel it – it helps to balance our all the other stuff.
So, when all else fails, go for a walk, with open eyes and mind and heart.
