I come from a land of Earth Mothers. On trips back to the West Coast — Northern California, Oregon — I note many hip young women are proud of their soft, rounded bellies, a more feminist 1970s standard of womanliness than the anorexic aughts. Like them, to me “being grounded” has meant a low center of self-gravity. Being solid in yourself. Tapped into the source. Unflappable.
personal compass
There’s a problem with concrete though. It cracks over time, in quickly changing conditions, and sometimes even under its own weight. Settling into a life choice or a mindset that feels right today can suddenly be unsatisfactory two minutes into Tuesday. Ever a joined a group only to realize you simply wanted partial-membership in it?
So I’ve been thinking about fluidity. Imagine being a bobbing buoy, tied to a point deep below the surface of changing options.
By putting some distance between me and my center of gravity, I have room to be in a wider orbit around the inner me.
The winds and waves take me to new realms of myself. Life phases, bad hair days, culture shocks. Friend, colleague, wife. Turkish resident. Foreign employer, American daughter-in-law. Inspirational (or incomprehensible) online acquaintance. They’re not always the same person and they don’t want to be.
A related post by artist Rose Deniz questions how one’s worldview literally shifts as a result of location. Just like the hybrid self, living a hybrid life to its fullest extent may require us to toss the concrete plan.
In a new expat+HAREM real-time discussion series launching February 28th, Deniz will curate a live-recorded conversation spurred by this notion. Ten international women will gather at the cross-roads to ponder the freedoms of blurry boundaries, and reveal the anchors of their multifaceted lives.
What determines your present orbit, and how does it change your self-view?
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Anastasia M. Ashman
2010 Capital of Culture monthly feature of best Istanbul links
Beautiful Anastasia! The ebb and flow of what we are, think we should be and will/want to become is exciting and sometimes (often) frightening. Sometimes, after giving my 9 year old daughter ‘guidelines’ on ‘what is’ and what it means to be a girl, woman in our society in the US, I retract my statements precisely because it doesn’t always apply in other countries/cultures and I want her to know about the world too. Indeed much of it might not apply to her at all as she grows with her own experiences, who knows in what direction. My hope is that she (and I) will always be open to change…comfortably or uncomfortably, and not fixate on a certain image or ‘way’ that seems to control what we experience.
Thanks Silvana. Yes imagine it’s difficult to raise a worldly person in one spot…
You remind me of something a wise friend once told me in Los Angeles in the early ’90s. She said, “If you don’t watch out you’ll end up driving around town in a jeep with a dog, and your cap turned backwards.” That is, without some form of self direction/deep anchor the environment absorbs you, and you become what already is, even if it’s not you at all. (That jeep-dog-cap scene was a bit of a trend in the Hollywood Hills at the time.)
I guess the challenge is how to be self-directed and flexible at the same time.
I had a ballet teacher who was fond of using this Chinese proverb to remind us to stay flexible:
The teeth are hard and they rot.
The tongue is soft and it survives.
What’s interesting is how we evolve throughout our lives which we can only do by holding on to the parts of ourselves that are working and letting the rest fall away.
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