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Elephant medicine and duality violations.
Aug. 4th, 2007 11:51 amPeople seem to get stuck on duality, even relatively intelligent people. It's easy to see why: 9/10ths of the options are in those two categories. But always choosing one of the two most popular options means that your brain has drowned in the mainstream, been undertowed and sucked into complacency. Sometimes you want to choose a different course to navigate, and if you've trained yourself to see only those options which present themselves most clearly, then you're missing out on a lot of opportunities to go a different way.
If the workplace were the Serengeti and you had to interact with the other animals in it, most people would be either predators or prey. If you want to be in control you're obviously a lion. If you want to have srength through solidarity, you're a wildebeest and may get eaten anyway. (If you just want to have great hair then you're a zeebra, and probably deserve to get eaten.) But what if you don't want to bother with power dynamics? You don't want to eat or be eaten, just to grow as a person until you're too strong to be pushed around? If you are taking a slow and difficult path of self-betterment that has nothing to do with fitting into the herd, or with being the scariest badass, then what kind of archetype is that?
You are an elephant. As a healthy adult, you will have no natural predators. Your massive, powerful feet are sensitive enough that you can tell a rock from a turtle, so you will never step on your neighbor the turtle. You do no harm to others and are the wisest creature in your landscape. How do you fit that much effort, vulnerability, and willingness to change into a social paradigm? How do you show that the boring, slow-moving elephant is a good alternative to the loud and cool-seeming lion? Or that not being a particular thing does not limit your choice to being its opposite?
If the workplace were the Serengeti and you had to interact with the other animals in it, most people would be either predators or prey. If you want to be in control you're obviously a lion. If you want to have srength through solidarity, you're a wildebeest and may get eaten anyway. (If you just want to have great hair then you're a zeebra, and probably deserve to get eaten.) But what if you don't want to bother with power dynamics? You don't want to eat or be eaten, just to grow as a person until you're too strong to be pushed around? If you are taking a slow and difficult path of self-betterment that has nothing to do with fitting into the herd, or with being the scariest badass, then what kind of archetype is that?
You are an elephant. As a healthy adult, you will have no natural predators. Your massive, powerful feet are sensitive enough that you can tell a rock from a turtle, so you will never step on your neighbor the turtle. You do no harm to others and are the wisest creature in your landscape. How do you fit that much effort, vulnerability, and willingness to change into a social paradigm? How do you show that the boring, slow-moving elephant is a good alternative to the loud and cool-seeming lion? Or that not being a particular thing does not limit your choice to being its opposite?