Who Am I?

Who am I? is an exercise in the Alternatives to Violence Project three day workshops on non-violence.  In the exercise, on 10 tiny slips of paper one lists all of the "identities" that one identifies with.   Eg: Mother, therapist, Quaker, woman, activist, etc.    Then one places them in order of importance with least important on the bottom.  Then you are invited to turn the pile over taking the least important one and "throw it away" - feeling into what it would be like to no longer have that identity.  Then you throw away the next one, sensing into that.....and so it continues.  The instructor manual warns to leave people with 3 identities and only suggest they could release the final 3 if it felt right to do that.

This is an exercise I did dozens and dozens of times in my time as an AVP facilitator.  As the pandemic swept in bringing the ban on travel to and from Europe, and stay in place recommendations and then orders....as events cancelled ranging at first from long distance travel and conferences to events over 100, and eventually....EVERYTHING, I found myself in a life size game of Who am I.
First releasing my vacation trip, then the conference for 180 people I had planned for months for the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day, then a workshop to be given in Portland, and then Friends General Conference and the workshop I was to give there.  Later even more painfully I would surrender the local Earthday parade: Procession of the Species, and FolkLife - a Memorial Day weekend of fun I have attended every year for 32 years without fail.

I was sort of surprised how easily the identities/expectations fell, although some were harder than others.  But there was simply a feeling of falling into a new world, an alternative reality in which none of those things existed and where nothing involving human contact existed.  In the liminal space which I had entered where everything and anything (both bad, unexpected and even good in a new way) seemed possible - these old identifies seemed almost irrelevant.

Since then I have listened to a number of people who have service identities who have been unable to serve in their accustomed ways because of stay at home orders, talk about how hard it feels to not be able to help, but even more strange how lost they feel without that role (identity).  As it so happens I believe that it is deep in our DNA in response to crisis to help others - this after all from our first tribal time was how we survived.  And it is the thing I most detest about this crisis - that its very nature forces us to go against the instinct to help.   However, when serving other people goes from being an impulse to an identity - one which one is profoundly uncomfortable with, than perhaps something else is actually happening.  Many people are also having to release the identify of "busy" which for many is also a defining identity and find new experiences of how to be connected to other people - both the ones under their roof and the ones they cannot see in person.   We are being forced to find other ways of both entertaining and exercising ourselves - ways more simple and perhaps basic to original human existence.

Some people talk about when things go back to normal.   I hope they don't; I hope we will learn some things from this gigantic game of Who Am I.   As was always the case with Who Am I there is the opportunity as you throw away external identities to find, or notice again, ones own more core spiritual identify and to discover the eternal nature of the soul that is always with us underneath the external wrapping.   To know more deeply who we really are.