Seize all possibilities

|
  • 0

Seize all possibilities

Monday, 06 May 2019 | Arjun Shekhar

Seize all possibilities

The Fifth Space is more psychological than being geographical. It’s a journey from self to society where people could experiment with and re-examine themselves, says author Arjun Shekhar 

It was a book called The Ocean in a Drop—Insideout Youth Leadership that inspired me to be myself. It was at this point when my faith in the other four spaces legitimised to youth today, (family, education/ career, friends and leisure) was at its lowest and my social hope was tattered that I came across the ‘Fifth Space.’ The idea swept me off my feet with its possibility. For the first time in my life, I felt that I could live up to my name. Possibilities were all around me... I just had to seize them.

The book, written by founders of Dhara and Changemakers Youth Collective, argued, rather persuasively, based on the writers’ experience of twenty plus years in the field of youth-centric development, that social and economic renewal, needed creation of empowering spaces for young people where they could re-imagine the connection between themselves and the society, where they could take a journey from self to society in such a way that they could re-examine themselves.

Youth and the society

What expectations do young people have from the society? What does society want from young people? What are their dreams, passion and capacities? There lies one powerful answer to three questions that policy-makers can ignore at their own peril. We need young leaders who are wholesome, congruent, and can create a lasting impact. There is an ocean in every young person’s drop which policy-makers should explore before pushing one into the duty of nation-building. Don’t you resonate with this idea? Our identity quest should be treated like a fundamental right. And to build our capacities to their full potential, we have to undertake the fundamental duties written in the Constitution. Small social actions that support other people to live a better life. This way, I am changing the world even as it is transforming me. To make us mere foot soldiers for someone else’s cause, is to minimise the potential of young people and the society they live in.

Thus, the authors imagined the Fifth Space as more psychological than geographical. It was an experience that lived and died in the moment. While each was unique (and hence, there was no particular name or ideology behind it), some principles guided the creation of such an experience. One that appealed to me was that it had to be co-led by the facilitators and young people. This was the most liberating thought in the book. We had got so used to the rules made by others and the expectations to conform that we could never experience what it meant to make and live by our own laws. And as we grew up, we did what came naturally to us — conform. We stayed within our own spheres of interest and concern leaving others (mostly ‘adults’) to deal with the common spaces. This was the reason for the degradation of our forests, oceans, deserts, cities and villages. The authors argued that the community connect of youth had to be revived and our contracts with society, clarifying the role each one was expected to play, needed renewal. To reverse the neglect of common spaces, they said these spaces would have to be reimagined with the youth. Many successful examples were shared, one of which I even visited later—the Ideabox Foundation in Bengal — but let me not get ahead of myself.

 

Get real — diving into the ocean of notion

I remember my first Fifth Space experience well. It was a workshop on deep self-awareness called Get Real. I expected the question we were going to focus on to be ‘Who am I?’ but it turned out we were going to spend most of the time on the question ‘Who are we?’ Through many experiential games, thought experiments and rich discussions, we figured out that as humans, our evolutionary niche (like the camel feet are padded for walking on sand) is language or our ability to put commonly-agreed symbols for objects, concepts, feelings, processes and structures. Fahad, the lead facilitator, showed us how we used language to transport us outside the moment (both in space and time) or bring something from another time and space into the ‘now,’ thereby giving us the ability to take better decisions than other species.

To understand what I am saying better, do you want to try a thought experiment that we did in the workshop? Alright, sit back with your eyes closed. Wait. How will you read with eyes closed? Take the help of someone else and make them read out this section to you. Youth facilitators or someone working with young people can use this exercise to get them (young people) to see this symbolic ability of language to transport us outside the moment.

So you see, we invented language to learn from the past, to imagine ourselves into the future and plan ahead of time. Language has been a great boon and we have overtaken every other species by becoming masters of the planet. We control everything except our minds. Fahad demonstrated how we had learnt to thrive and survive by travelling outside the moment using our symbolic ability but we couldn’t switch it off ever, not even when we slept. Thought has no present, only a past and a future. We were trapped outside the moment just as the rest of the species were caged inside it. So, while it had helped us rise to the top of the pecking order, symbolic ability or language had also given humanity our biggest banes — uncontrollable desires, anxiety, fears, and regrets to name a few.

How to manage these banes? For this, symbolic literacy was the need of the hour. We transact our lives in stories; at the core of our being, we are word merchants and yet we don’t know enough about our symbolic learning ability. After an outdoor adventure exercise, we recognised how our fears are only phantoms produced by our imagination. It was a liberating thought. When Fahad, the lead facilitator, helped us understand that we could change our inner self merely by re-scripting some of the stories we’d told ourselves, it freed me up like nothing else ever had before. Can you imagine being the station master rather than the driver (or many times even a passenger) of your train of thoughts? Doesn’t it make you feel more in control already? Further, imagine sitting in your station master’s office, pulling out the charts and observing the stops and timings?

And then ordering a change in its schedule and route to assert your charge? Fahad put it beautifully, ‘Freedom is just another word for regaining control over your life.’ Of course, it was easier said than done. ‘We all have a fear of fears,’ Fahad said. This made it very difficult for me to examine my fears, let alone rewrite them. But for the first time, after the exercise, at least I was able to articulate my major fear. I was mortally afraid of failure or rejection, which made me avoid trying things beyond my comfort zone. In case things didn’t go right, I blamed others; even if it meant lying to myself. I glossed over my errors and brushed them under the carpet.

Are you also running away from your fears like me?

Fahad told us to do the opposite. He said the first step was to befriend these fears, not shoo them away. Because only when you stop rejecting the fear, would you get a chance to watch it and only when you quit struggling against it would you begin to see the patterns. How was I ever going to sit with my fear rather than bolting from its shadow? The first shift happened when I listened to others’ fears and found mine was not unique. Several others had the same fear. Suddenly, I found the extreme turbulence in my mind that arose from uncovering my fear start to settle down.

(The extract is taken from the book ComMutiny, Sparking an Inside-out Youth Leadership Revolution, co-written by Mahamaya Navlakha.)

Sunday Edition

CAA PASSPORT TO FREEDOM

24 March 2024 | Kumar Chellappan | Agenda

CHENNAI EXPRESS IN GURUGRAM

24 March 2024 | Pawan Soni | Agenda

The Way of Bengal

24 March 2024 | Shobori Ganguli | Agenda

The Pizza Philosopher

24 March 2024 | Shobori Ganguli | Agenda

Astroturf | Lord Shiva calls for all-inclusiveness

24 March 2024 | Bharat Bhushan Padmadeo | Agenda

Interconnected narrative l Forest conservation l Agriculture l Food security

24 March 2024 | BKP Sinha/ Arvind K jha | Agenda