A Walking Permission-Slip, Episode 300
It's our 300th episode, so we are feeling very celebratory. This week our conversation takes up the question of permission. What do we make possible - give permission for - in others, by our way of being and interacting with the world? And what do we make impossible?
Can we begin to catch on to the patterns that have become habitual to us (and often invisible to us) so we can start to be more intentional about what others can bring us, and what they can't? And can we find a way to open the horizons of welcome so we less and less try to control others so they're 'just the way we want them' and instead meet them and welcome them more fully exactly as they are?
This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
Here’s our source for this week:
The Walking Permission Slip
As I walk the world, I walk as a set of permissions.
Around me you can break.
Around me you must behave.
Around me you must be ashamed.
Around me you can be yourself.
Around me you can be honest. Truly, messily honest.
As I walk the world, I walk as a set of permissions.
I want to know if you’re suffering.
I want to know only your good bits.
I want to know if you’re sad.
I want to know of your successes but not your failures.
I want to know the ways you love me.
As I walk the world, I walk as a set of permissions.
What are my implicit permissions? What do I imply by the way I speak, act, the language I use? How do my responses either welcome more or tell others to cut off of or edit themselves? What do I make it OK for you to be by me being me, with you?
As I walk the world, I walk as a set of permissions.
This set of permissions can thankfully change. We can give up the set we got given for another set that allows people around us to be fully themselves if we like. It really is possible.
We can ask ourselves what shows up around us, what doesn’t, what others feel safe to reveal to us, what they feel they have to hide. And we can make some decisions about what we actually want the answer to that to be. And then the work begins. Of becoming that which we intend rather than that which we unwittingly, habitually invite by walking the world the way we walk it.
Lizzie Winn 7/7/23
Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash