Take a Knee!
“We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience.” John Dewey
I don’t know anything about football or other team sports and yet it’s a powerful image when I see players propped in stillness on one knee instead of swirling around on the field. I appreciate the moment of reverence for the injured athlete in a high school game, and the immediacy of Colin Kaepernick’s silent action — lowering his strength and power to the ground.
Taking a knee brings pause. It connects us to the ground. Such kneeling is a humble and complicated act that allows us to find balance; it is a position both stable, bringing us closer to the ground, and vulnerable with the knee, rather than the foot, as balance point. It’s cumbersome to arrive at this position and for anyone with tender knees a bit painful.
The position of half kneeling does, however, offer a new vantage point from which new possibilities can appear.
In contrast to this silent act of contemplative stillness, coaches and referees running around the field, yelling and gesturing with their arms, seem like sirens blaring without deeper meaning. They appear so helpless, their frenzy highlighting, by contrast, the power of a group of people quietly taking a knee.
I am reminded of this silent action as I grasp for understanding and context in the current pandemic. COVID-19 feels like a game out of control, except in this game, I am not alone in striving to understand the constantly shifting rules.
In this time of COVID-19, figurative coaches are yelling and gesturing, some position themselves as referees, and everyone is looking at the scoreboard as if the numbers would be the answer to it all.
With COVID-19 nature threw us into a game we weren’t prepared for nor did we want to play. In this game, we all are showing up as our true selves, selves neither choreographed, nor trained, nor dressed up, but rather jolted out of bed by a fire alarm, running out of the house at 3 am, messy hair, flannel pajama pants and slippers with eyes and mouths wide open, our body language in the mode of fright and flight.
Hovering in the middle of the street confused and in disbelief, we hear the firetruck, but something is different. In this scenario, the firefighters are just pretending. Somehow they got hold of the key to the fire station and had a party in there, and now they are forced to follow through with their charade…. You know where this story is going, we are all experiencing it even as I write these words.
I have a lot of questions and feelings about how the firefighters got into the figurative fire station, just the same way I am wondering how our current guy in charge got behind the wheel in the White House, but that feels so abstract that I have to leave it for chapter two of this story.
For now, I am feeling the jolt, the scare, the adrenaline. Seeing my neighbors equally disheveled, with too many questions, and the big question,“What are we supposed to do now?” In the moment of pause, between the inhale of fear and the exhale of a scream, we know.
The answer arises from deep inside and we listen, then act: We help each. We make sure we have a place to go back to with water, food and clothing. We laugh about our un-coiffed hair and unwashed, flannel covered bodies, and feel gratitude for our connection.
Not knowing the rules, we stay tucked away in our homes, having been told that this is the safest place to be. From this distance, we meet each other with a mix of concern, care and gratitude. The physical distance and the place of uncertainty force us to slow down. For the first time ever, maybe, we see what’s right in front of us, feel our heart’s wisdom and its resilient strength. We not only manage, but transform from human doings to human beings.
Having been forced by circumstance to slow down, the game called COVID 19 continues, but we now can begin to study the game. We start to imagine uniforms and rules that could elevate this experience from chaos to constructive transformation. A transformation in which we actively create new rules and a new way of playing. In this version, our attention isn’t on the scoreboard but directed toward each other and our shared well being.
Just as we get settled into the possibilities of this new game, the government intervenes again. We had just started planting our gardens, learned to make sourdough bread and show up on zoom meetings; we wrestled through the complicated unemployment forms and had found a stride, albeit gingerly, with new daily routines, and just then the firetruck pulled up again and, sirens blaring, with lots of yelling and big gestures, the firefighters now telling us to get out of the house and back to our lives.
Once again, a group of fake firefighters has asked us to compete in the Olympics in a dangerous sport that we haven’t even learned yet.
Once again, I feel adrenaline rushing through my body, see the fear-fueled confusion in the eyes of my neighbors and, once again, we stand in fright and flight bewilderment.
As we stumble into this new game, patching together fragments of potential possibility and meaning, I am astounded by the streak of competitiveness that rises to the surface. The numbers are being reported every night: Team Germany only had x deaths and lifted the lock-down after y days, while team Japan had z deaths and stayed in lock-down for z weeks. And China is on the bench for a foul while Russia is quietly recording the game in order to later train their super team that will take home the gold medal in the final round.
With lockdowns lifted or ignored, with a lot of pushing, pulling and jostling between leaders of the world and communities large and small, I begin to imagine how we as a team can take a knee and give the game a pause, a moment to recalibrate and write new rules.
I envision how we can find our way out of the current chaos, moving into a deeper collective rhythm and structure, where we all can meet, and each find a place on the field — as in any good improvisation where we carefully listen to each other and play off each other, creating something that holds more power and meaning than each of us could ever achieve on our own. If we do this well, rather than rushing into another mad scramble, we will improvise on the stage called life in the manner of good Jazz — no winner or loser, but very good music.
