I ‘performed’ through physical expression the past 10 year’s life journey. In the expression of a line drawn on paper, it starts with a very electric, haphazard ups and downs within a graph. The amplitude grows less and less extreme until the ups and downs transforms into a sine-wave, a slow waving. And at the very end of the graph, the line begins circling, so there is a contrast: life is a moving forward like in a graph, but also a circling, a cycling and dealing with roughly the same, but always what you’ve proven yourself able of handling. And the line ends at the beginning, where my journey started.
Something amazing about this physical reality is it allows everyone to express difficulty differently. So literally imagine my ‘performance’, with 5 other people performing in the same space.
From the left, I jumped up and down, slowly moving forward. Then I slalomed in a sideways sine wave around two obstacles. Then walking slower and slower, I eventually reach the beginning point of where I started with jumping. To me, the waving sideways is particularly clever, because aside from waving up and down, moving side to side in a sine wave pattern indicates a move from polarity to physical practicality.
It’s always better to stay down and be humble, and apply humility. Spiting the process I’ve walked, it’s the more I know, the more I should act as if I don’t know, and give people the space to say what they want. The more I know, the more I should be stable enough to handle someone criticizing my living example without wanting to correct them at every turn. I have the oldest idea that the more I become, the more I am. But actually, it’s more like: the more I become and live and apply, the more I am able to remain stable standing as less and less, until I seem like nothing. The integrity of a substance is in its durability. Part of being durable is being able and willing to withstand someone’s verbal knocks on my ego.
I participated in a class about self discovery through physical movement. In total there were 6 of us, and today in the last class I noted that people were criticizing me. Instead of seeing what I saw in my ‘performance’, they locked on the faint smile I was having with myself during performing. They noted how happy I was. My first surprised question at myself was, “Did I display something that deserved someone’s jealousy?” At once I examined my ego and asked what it felt to be portrayed in someone else’s speech as a nuisance. I took a long, deep breath. And everything that mattered, like this physical reality, kept supreme stable despite each other’s reactions. It was a case of, if I don’t mind then it doesn’t matter, in the context of people’s criticism. My living example remains, and whether I like it or not, how I expressed through my physical body in behavior stood and is standing as a living statement of what I stand for, even as a memory in each other’s minds, other’s criticisms is actually more evidence that my living example is clearer to them than me, because they are reacting to my living example.
I don’t know how to assist and support someone in the midst of a seeming jealous criticizing spree but rather than correcting them, I felt content to stay silent and give them the space to express.
Kasper's Journey To Life 