Up against a wall

Something there is that does not love a wall

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. Robert Frost

We build walls, make, break, and remake. We build walls insides of ourselves, outside of ourselves. I sometimes wonder if technology is a wall between the soft skin of meeting each other on the train, on the sidewalk, sitting waiting for a plane.

Relationship with our phones, our computers, twittering, mailing, blogging away to others far from the immediacy of where we are in any given moment. The walls we build against the fragility of human interaction as if deeply aware that we can be cut, bruised, scrapped from the openness of interaction, dialogue and conversation skin to skin.

There is something in us, as Robert Frost wrote, that does not love a wall and the weight of our walls crumbles under a smile, a wink, a brushing against laughter.

Someone told me a story of taking her daughter to work one day. She stayed with her at the office the whole day. At the end of the day she said ‘Mommy when I grow up I want to have a REAL job, not like yours’. She wanted to be nurse or a cab driver. Something where she was not interacting with machines the whole daylong.

I was walking to the train station and on my right hand side someone had build four walls from wood in the middle of the grass with a peep whole in one of the walls. Too curious to keep walking I looked inside, through the hole; there was nothing to be seen except the grass, the trees and an empty bench. I laughed, it was simple but my expectation has been much more.

Maybe we build these walls around us and in us because we are afraid of what we would expose behind the wall. Or afraid of all those expectations to be something, to be special, to be successful, to be something to impress we feel that under all those bricks what we are is simply not enough.

Coaching and facilitating as well as my own path has taught me that just ‘being’ is difficult, difficult to dig through our erected walls to discover the simplicity of ourselves in its beauty and in its ugliness, in it its relationship with every things around us.
Walls keep things out but also prevent us from living expansively. Coaching is chipping away the wall to let some light and air in. Here we begin to live, to have real relationship with others and ourselves and we learn that the goal is not the doing, the getting, the buying, the striving, we are the goal as we are, whatever we are.