Half a Step into Self-forgetting

Just beyond
yourself.

It’s where
you need
to be.

Half a step
into
self-forgetting
and the rest
restored
by what
you’ll meet.

There is a road
always beckoning.

- from David Whyte, "Just Beyond Yourself" 

Before you proceed with this entry, I encourage everyone to read (or listen to) the rest of “Just Beyond Yourself” by David Whyte on his own Substack. 

This also reminds me of a quote from Judith Butler. They state:

“To be ec-static means, literally, to be outside oneself, and this can have several meanings: to be transported beyond oneself by a passion, but also to be beside oneself with rage or grief ... I am speaking to those of us who are living in certain ways beside ourselves, whether it is in sexual passion, or emotional grief, of political rage. In a sense, the predicament is to understand what kind of community is composed of those who are beside themselves.” (Undoing Gender). 

Somewhere between grief and resolution, there is the discomfort of disruption. While Butler is referring primarily to the ecstasy and grief that is experienced by those in the LGBTQIA+ community, their broader point is one that unites us in our capacity to feel pulled out of place, out of time, and out of self.

Things happen in our lives that bring us to new places, both externally and internally. On the surface they may even seem mundane: we move to a new city or explore a new destination and feel that initial awkwardness of not knowing where anything is or how things work; of not knowing the rhythms of the dwelling you’re in or the spaces around it; of not knowing where to get the best coffee in the morning; or where you can sit quietly and read. It is a discomfort that makes us more self-aware, highlighted by the fact that we are a stranger to whatever new space we’re in, which eventually opens the possibility of being a stranger to ourselves. 

Photo by Paul Garaizar on Unsplash

We experience new internal spaces with a similar kind of awkwardness. What once satisfied no longer does; or what was once a space of possibility is now one of constraint and limitation. We are inexorably pulled out of our usual routines by a growing sense of discomfort ... a niggling itch that seems just out of reach. We find ourselves in that sometimes terrifying space of knowing that things can’t go on the way they are, but we have absolutely no idea what the alternative may be. 

In those moments, we are pulled out of ourselves in ways in which we may not have existentially consented. The “ecstasy” to which Judith Butler ultimately refers in Undoing Gender exists in a space that defies both pleasure and pain. It is, instead, a state of disruption. A disruption of self, a disruption of place, and a disruption of time. Other philosophers like Heidegger mention the same state as one of “being,” manifest through the “first question,” which is felt, rather than asked. 

“The question looms in moments of great despair, when things tend to lose all their weight and all meaning becomes obscured. . . It is present in moments of rejoicing, when all the things around us are transfigured and seem to be there for the first time, as if it might be easier to think that they are not than to understand that they are and are as they are.  The question is upon us in boredom, when we are equally removed from despair and joy, and everything about us seems so hopelessly commonplace that we no longer care whether anything is or is not.” (Introduction to Metaphysics, 1-2)

And it is a moment when we feel that we are, in Judith Butler’s words “outside ourselves.” 

And hence an “existential crisis.” The word “existential” often gets the most attention, and we can read plenty of Sartre, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard to help us with all the different iterations and connotations of the term. However, for this entry, I want to concentrate on “crisis”: 

crisis (n.)

early 15c., crise, crisis, "decisive point in the progress of a disease," also "vitally important or decisive state of things, point at which change must come, for better or worse," from Latinized form of Greek krisis "turning point in a disease, that change which indicates recovery or death" (used as such by Hippocrates and Galen), literally "judgment, result of a trial, selection," from krinein "to separate, decide, judge," from PIE root *krei- "to sieve," thus "discriminate, distinguish."

A crisis is actually a turning point ... that liminal space of inevitability just before a decision is made, either by us or for us. Even when made for us, action of some kind is necessary, either passive or active. It is a space ... much like the dot over the “I” of “Jeremy Bearimy” from The Good Place  ... where nothing never occurs. It is the tipping point where there can be nothing but action. 

The crisis point is never the events that lead up to it. The point itself can be one of almost deathly calm. Then after these moments of crisis comes that estrangement from ourselves, that feeling that David Whyte calls “self-forgetting,” when we need to extricate our core selves from the container(s) in which it was: work, family, relationships.

That “self” often takes the shape of various self-chosen and imposed boundaries and parameters which once served us, but which no longer can hold our full self in its entirety. In that momentary shapelessness, we are called to release much of what we thought we were. Forgetting here is a release; or, for some, a refusal to reconstruct ourselves in relation to that which no longer serves, no longer welcomes, or no longer protects.  

We can only have faith that we will be restored by what we know we will meet but resides in its own vanishing point, like arbitrary points on the horizon. That’s the space where we have to be, and where we will find ourselves.