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The precious art of knowing how to get out of the way

Francisco Miraval

At a recent meeting, a lady asked me what she could do to help her teenage soon. I asked her what was the problem and she told me her son was already taking college physics and biology, learned several languages, and was working to save money for future trips. I immediately told this lady: “Get out of his way.”

She wasn’t happy with my answer and, perhaps assuming it was not obvious to me, she said, “But I am his mother!” Perhaps, I guess, it was not obvious to her that it is very difficult for parents to get out of the way of their children, but in many cases that’s the best way to help them (and to help ourselves.)

I am not talking about getting out of the way as a method to reject our own responsibilities and I am not talking about leaving the other person alone and without support. Also, getting out of the way should not be understood as some kind of defeat or as a confession of being powerless or inferior.

Getting out of the way, as Aldous Huxley once said (in This I Believe, by Edward Murrow) means “to do something to make future history a little less tragic and less ironic than history past and present.” And that “something” that Huxley asked us to do is, so to speak, not interfering with whatever is happening just because we don’t understand or control what is happening.

That, I think, is what was affecting the lady I mentioned above. In her opinion, her son should wait until college to take college classes and then (and at the same time) he should find both a job and a wife. Any deviation from that plan meant that she had to intervene and “help
him to find the “correct” path.

Nobody doubts about the good intentions of this lady or about her love for her son. But love and good intentions should not lead us to assume our answers are valid from all generations and, in fact, are the only valid answers. Quite the opposite, we need to acknowledge our place in the world and allow others to find it. And that requires humility.

That’s something that, according to Huxley, we can learn. And, once we learn to get out of other’s way, we also need to learn how to get out of the way of our own life, that is, we need to stop living according to prejudices and half-truths just because we assume they are the “universal truth.”

Why we need to get out of the way of ourselves? Because when we learn “how to get out of the way, the divine source (or inner Light) of my life and consciousness can come out of the eclipse and shine though me”, Huxley said.

In other words, getting out of the day is to “un-eclipse,” to allow others’ light to shine. The paradox is that as soon we do it, our own light will also shine.

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