Here’s what I wrote in class today on learning and vulnerability:
I believe that in order to learn one must become vulnerable. At the same time, to make learning possible conditions must be created in which the learners feel safe enough to take risks. There is risk inherent in admitting one is a beginner, not an expert, and there is risk in accepting that one is incomplete--that one has learning, growing, and changing to do. Yet however dangerous it may seem or feel to take such a risk--the risk of admitting partiality--it must be said that the far greater risk, and the danger that poses the greatest threat to our common survival on the planet Earth, is to fail to recognize and take as a starting point our own incompletion, imperfection, ignorance. In order to survive, we must learn; and in order to learn, we must risk: we must become vulnerable.
Vulnerability is becoming to us. It becomes us as individuals and as a species. It is our truest situation or state, yet it is the fact of our lives we are too often most hesitant to acknowledge to ourselves and to others. We hide our common and diverse vulnerabilities to our individual and collective detriment.
End of quote.
So becoming has double and triple meanings. I like the word for what it signifies. It implies openness and motion, growth and awareness--and this blog will be about these features of becoming and also, I hope, a demonstration of them: an enactment, a performance, a writing.
Yet the first quote, the one I opened with, is too preachy and sure of itself. It's a moment in time; a point of departure or beginning. Let's not get too comfortable in these certain words, no matter their will to recognize incompletion. Words can be cheap--and they are if empty. One thing to do in this context: make them real.
Stay tuned.
