Journey to Nowhere, Part I
The Last Frontier
Thank you Mum!
If anyone asks how I ended up in Los Angeles, I tell them it’s my mother’s fault.
I felt so constrained by the family rules, that I left as fast as I could and went as far as possible. That impulse turned out to be the whole story.
At twenty-four I got my first job guiding adventure tours in the Sahara. My next posting was Uganda, 1987, with Médecins Sans Frontières, a french NGO working populations in needs around the world. By the time I landed in Los Angeles thirty years later, I’d worked across seventy countries on five continents.
United Nations
In 1989, I got my first job in the UN system. High Commissioner for Refugees.
The conference room was immaculate and cool while outside the tropical heat was crushing and the red dust of laterite ever present. Eight of us around the table, eight countries, eight mother tongues operating in eight different accents of English. The conversation had the particular fatigue of people trying to solve problems that shouldn’t exist.
I made my point. I no longer remember what it was. Something practical, something logical, something that made complete sense inside the framework twenty-eight years of being French had given me.
My boss looked at me. He had cut corners to get me on the team, I knew he liked me. He was from Sierra Leone, educated in England, sharper than anyone I’d met before. Everyone was waited for him to speak. He let a small silence pass, looking at me with a smile.
That is so French!
The conversation moved on. I sat with the unsettling surprised of someone who looked in the mirror and did not see what was expected. The worst of it wasn’t the comment. It was that I had no access to what he was seeing. The filter was so close to my face I couldn’t bring it into focus.
I was looking through it, not at it.
Fast forward
Five years in Africa. Fifteen in Asia. Eight in North America. Two in South America. Europe where it started.
The French filter, visible only when surrounded by people who didn’t share it. The Western filter, visible only in the south and the east. The white filter, visible only as the single white man in a small African town. The religious filter, moving between Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Animists. The language filter — I learned three more languages and watched what each one made thinkable.
Each frontier crossed removed a filter.
Each filter mistaken for reality until the next crossing exposed it as a lens.
Transfiguration
Thailand 2013. The hall was vast, open on all sides, fans where keeping the heat outside. Men in white, sat in a circle facing outward. Women in red, a larger circle facing in.
A bell rang. With careful movement, the women rotated one position left. A new face to witness.
This went on for several hours.
After a while something happened, not a single noticeable moment. More like the eyes moving from bright light to the shade. First blinded then slowly seeing. The particular details of each face began to blur: the smiles, the shape of the lips, the way someone held her gaze, the intensity of her presence, the hair color, the specific history written in the wrinkles. The details lost their edges. Became transparent.
What remained had been present in every face and visible in none of them.
I was sitting with the feminine principle. A presence. The archetype that had been wearing each of these faces in turn, patient, waiting to be seen past the costume.
I sat very still. The bell rang again. Another face.
That’s when I understood. I had been looking at women through a man’s eyes for so long I had never really seen anything but my filter.
Angels
2016, Los Angeles, the first year. I kept a discipline: every name, every face, committed to memory. The least I could offer was full presence to the specific person, not a problem, not a case.
Quickly numbers and time made that impossible.
Session after session. The room could change. The process refined itself. The quality of attention that build proximity deepens. What went unsaid became louder than the story shared. Stories, defenses, explanations, my job was to wait, or probe, until they exhausted themselves and something else pierced through.
What remained when the explanation ran out is always simpler than the story. Fear, grief, longing playing hide and seek within the story. At some point the surface vanished and the depth became more visible than the performance. And in the depth: our shared humanity. All of us. No exceptions.
Myself included. I see myself in each of my clients. The same essence. And also the same fears, the same grief, the same longing.
Then I saw the human filter. The unexamined assumption that the human perspective is a vantage point, a place to stand and observe from.
It is just another lens.
The Last crossing.
You’re smart enough to see where this goes.
The frame through which I had been watching everything, including the dissolution of all the other frames, was itself a frame. It was not an epiphany. Just the sudden visibility of the last lens.
I’ve now sat long enough with nature that I can lose that one too, when I choose.
The absence of filter is not emptiness. The journey to nowhere brought me to the ground that holds all the frames. Not void. Nowhere is the ground before all the somewheres.
That’s where I’m writing from. What’s visible from here, is coming next.
PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by.
Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.