Sometimes it's liberating. For example, my sister – step-sister, actually, but that matters only in that we don't share genetic material – is an absolutely lovely person. Seen in photos, she can be intimidating: she is tall, slim, beautiful, fit, and .. well, if you saw her, you'd understand why on a trip when we were kids a small Jamaican boy ran after us and desperately tried to buy her from me with a large outstretched handful of (presumably) drugs. (He was like 10, his brain had just fallen out of his head.)
The point is, without context or familiarity, something that powerful (i.e., a presence like my sister's) can evoke unbalanced responses.
What people come to realize is that perhaps my sister's greatest inborn strength is that she seems truly natural to herself. Over the years, she's had to work hard to get where she is, to become who she is, but somehow she's only seemed to grow more available to others while she's done this.
The result is that you should really see her enter a room of mixed friends and strangers – first, everyone notices. But any sense that she'd take that reaction and use it evaporates immediately: she's happy to be there, to see people, to interact. She's not there to be distracted, or to be seen, or to act.
Her easygoing nature and lack of anxiety dispel a lot of distracting vibes around her. People warm as she talks to them and, you know, allows them to respond. They realize that she's not going to start acting ... well, she could get away with a lot, you might say.
But she's not like that, and something about her silently grants a kind of permission to those around her to relax, just a bit. Something in their brains is telling them that this knockout isn't competing with them or about to belittle them, that she's not a threat at all.. and hey, isn't it kind of weird that beautiful people can even be so threatening anyway? Everyone's anxious little mind unclenches in teeny increments.
Now, I don't mention this as a paean to my sister's grace of character, or whatever. Actually, it was just that I saw a different lovely young woman the other day perform a similar thing — enter and effortlessly defuse a room that was suddenly much happier and pleasant with itself for having her in it, and without all of the ego-tumult that happens if people start jockeying for attention. Just, bang, a slightly better room with people who're slightly less on-edge, and therefore better all-around.
It's almost as though people like my sister and this woman can subliminally confer a different idea of what might happen next, and people see a different "how" for the occasion, a way which might not be as tiresome and catty as one had feared.
It is in this frame of mind that I've been considering that in seemingly having so very much of his "how" – the vectors and pressures in his life, his mechanics of thought – exposed in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it may be difficult for readers to look and see Robert Pirsig as, at least in part, an (unwittingly?) unreliable narrator.
But I spent too long thinking on permission and anxiety, so we Zen on the morrow.
Cheers—
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