I can't play Captain Hook
Returning to the present moment
My last dream before waking this morning was a complex one, freighted with personal warnings in deep disguise.
In the dream it is opening night of Peter Pan, and I am cast as Captain Hook, a character I’ve been fascinated with ever since NBC’s 1955 live Producers' Showcase restaging of the Broadway hit with Mary Martin playing Peter and Cyril Richard playing Captain Hook.
The dream conflict is that I don’t know my lines at all. I’ve never been to a rehearsal, and I don’t even know the staging for my part. I can’t find any one on the cast or crew who can help me.
I finally find the director and berate her for never announcing rehearsals or checking in with me. I feel very self-righteous.
Then I wake up, puzzled.
Sometimes such dreams resist deciphering. This one, though, began manifesting as my brain’s old waking habit of reeling off all the unmet obligations and task it tells me daily that I ought to worry about.
This morning, though, I returned my attention from all this inner noise to the present moment. For me this exercise means bringing my attention back physically to the space around my solar plexus. I’ve learned that this is were I hold anxiety—the sense of not being in control and having no place to stand.
The thing is, the solar plexus is also my place of stability in groundlessness, my visceral reminder that I need neither control of circumstances nor the certainty of unchanging solid ground in order to act in the moment. I just need to come back and trust that at the right time I will sense the next step and take it.
Once I was more in the moment this morning, I got dressed and did half an hour of tai chi standing exercises. I’ve learned that physically active centering works better for me than sitting meditation.
When I am paying full attention to how every part of my body is engaged in every movement (that wonderful word proprioception), the thoughts and feelings still cross my mind. But I am only paying attention to the tai chi.
As soon as I notice a distraction, I turn my awareness back to what I am doing. Each person has different ways of doing this sort of focusing. Spirit-centered physical action is what works for me at present.
Back to the dream, though. By not letting distractions interrupt my tai chi, I was able to note and file some of them for later, without engaging with them emotionally in the moment.
One of the passing distractions hit home when I returned to it later this morning. The blaming of the director for my own failure to fulfill my responsibility to the Captain Hook role.
I’ve done this sort of ego dodge over and over again throughout my life. Taken on a complex obligation and then—even if I did do some of the work—basically blaming the others involved for my shortcomings.
So the dream was in part a warning for me about the uncommonly busy time of worldly commitments I am moving into. More commitments than I want. The predicament of anyone whose skills and interests become known to others in a volunteer-sustained group.
Yes, the dream was a wake-up call.
When I am being open to requests for my volunteerism, am I also attentive to my real limitations? Or am I seducing myself with my childhood habit of “teacher’s petitude” [see Note]? Am I trying to please and feel important—beyond my means to actually satisfy the obligation?
Hmm….
Note: See “Walhydra’s Porch: Confessions of a Teacher's Pet” for the history of “teacher’s petitude.”
Images:
“Captain Hook,” by F.D. Bedford, from James Matthew Barrie, Peter and Wendy, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1912, page 188 [Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons].
“Mike Shell, second grade (1958).”
Thanks, Lyn.
Cute, Lyn Cope