~5 min
MY FRIEND RAND taught a group of us about the Möbius strip this week. A Möbius strip is a famous mathematical shape made by taking a strip of paper, giving it a half-twist (180°), and joining the ends together. Because of this twist, the strip only has one continuous surface and one continuous edge, meaning it has no distinct “inside” or “outside”. The Möbius strip represents, in part, an individual’s attempt at congruence.
RAND contrasts the Möbius strip with the mask of a performer. The performer takes on the identity of the role they are playing. The stronger that connection becomes, the more affirmation the performer receives. Over time, the role can become increasingly familiar, until the boundary between the person and the performer is no longer clear.
A Challenge: Is it possible to live life where the inside and outside of you are one?
AN EXCERPT FROM DAVID WHYTE’S CONSOLATIONS, given to me by my friend Jim.
BESIEGED
is how most people feel most of the time: by events, by people, by all the necessities of providing, parenting or participating and even and most especially by the creative possibilities they have set in motion themselves, and most especially, a success they have achieved through long years of endeavor.
To feel crowded, set upon, blocked by circumstances, in defeat or victory, is not only the daily experience of most human beings in most contemporary societies; it has been an abiding dynamic of individual life since the dawn of human consciousness. In a human life there is no escape from commitment: retreat to a desert island and the lonely islander will draw up a Robinson Crusoe list to make the place habitable or begin building a raft to escape; tell everyone to go away and they hang around wanting to know why. Earn a great deal of money to gain individual freedom and a whole world moves in for a share of the harvest.
If the world will not go away then the great discipline seems to be the ability to make an identity that can live in the midst of everything without feeling beset. Being besieged asks us to begin the day not with a to do list but a not-to-do list, a moment outside of the time bound world in which it can be re-ordered and re-prioritized…We give our self and our accomplishments, our ambitions and our over described hopes away, in order to see in what form they return to us.
To lift the siege, we do our best for our children but then, at the right time, send them off with a blessing, no matter their perilous direction: we run a business while remembering, as the overhead grows, how the enterprise was originally our doorway to freedom. We celebrate success but realize that another horizon now beckons, that we have in effect to start again, many times over. To get the measure of our success, we learn to call for an intimate close-in interiority, rather than a hoped for, unattainable, far and away.
Besieged as we are, little wonder that men and women alternate between the dream of a place apart, untouched by the world and then wanting to be wanted again in that aloneness. Besieged or left alone, we seem to live best at the crossroad between irretrievable aloneness and irretrievable belonging, and even better, as a conversation between the two where no choice is available. We are both; other people will never go away and aloneness is both possible and necessary.
Creating a state of aloneness in the besieged everyday may be one of the bravest things individual men and women can do for themselves. ‘Nel mezzo’, in the midst of everything, as Dante said, to be besieged - but beautifully, because we have made a place to stand - in the people and the places and the perplexities we have grown to love, seeing them not now as enemies or forces laying siege, but as if for the first time, as participants in the drama, both familiar and strangely surprising. We find that having people knock on our door is as much a privilege as it is a burden; that being seen, being recognized and being wanted by the world and having a place in which to receive everyone and everything, is infinitely preferable to its opposite.
PURSUING LIBERATION may be Whyte’s point. It made me think of one of my favorite books, Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse who explains how to overcome the besieged life.
Death in life is a way of living where a person has stopped competing, striving, and playing the social status game. They no longer seek titles, recognition, or victory over others.
For some people, this is a tragic surrender—a person giving up, accepting defeat, and no longer trying to achieve anything meaningful.
But for others, it is something entirely different: a spiritual accomplishment. Through discipline and inner work, they have freed themselves from the need to prove themselves, win status, or be recognized by others.
In this second sense, “death in life” means becoming liberated from the endless struggle for importance and identity. It is the state the Sufi mystics describe when they say:
“Die before you die.”
In other words: let your ego, ambition, and attachment to status die while you are still alive, so that you can live freely rather than being driven by the need for recognition.
ALL THIS TALK OF SIEGES AND LIBERATION made me think of my friend Jeremie’s practical tool for liberating people at work.
I SPENT AN UNREASONABLE AMOUNT OF TIME time trying to work a clever Strait of Hormuz liberation joke into this. Regrettably, every version was either forced or inappropriate.
That said, if you’re interested in the inappropriate version, email me and I’ll send you the link.
Faith improves my life. Here is a verse I like from the Bible:
“For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God?”
A QUOTE WORTH READING:
“To be nobody-but-yourself in a world which is doing its best night and day to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.”
— e.e. cummings
~IT IS NEVER TOO LATE TO TAKE THE MASK OFF~
@renzistone33 on X, LinkedIn & Substack
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