Lessons from the Wild: Embracing the Unknown with Open Arms
DISCLAIMER: I am not a medical professional and this blog post in no way should be taken as medical advice. If you think you might have ADHD, seek advice from a medical professional, such as your doctor.
I don't think people are as afraid of the unknown as they are of not-knowing. The unknown is a thing. Not-knowing is process. Just imagine for a moment you don't know what's about to happen. Where you're about to go. What you're about to do. Outside of a general direction, you have no clue of what the future or what the future of the future holds.
For example, I keep approaching in these travels the face of not knowing every time I get ready to jump on the plane. On the other side of it landing somewhere I've never been before wherever it goes, I can't predict what will be there. I cannot predict, largely, how the people will respond to me and how I need to interact with them before I arrive. I can't predict the environment I'm walking (figure of speech) into.
So, the experience of the 'unknown' exists out there (outside of me). An experience of 'not-knowing' exists in here (in my perceptions and in my internal experience). Calling it the unknown on some level separates me from the experience that I'm having because it says that I know what the unknown is like ... when it is always outside of what I can know and am knowing ... that's the point.
There is the experience of the Unknown and the experience of not knowing the Unknown one can have over and over again with each city I come in contact with that I've never seen before. If I come to a city, I've been, there are still things about that city I don't know and can't yet know and won't ever know and even more so, what can't possibly be known.
If you've never heard of the Hunter in a Farmer's world, concept, that's on some level what I'm speaking to. I'm living it. Everyone in each of their prospective environments pays attention in a particular way to what's happening. Farmers are looking for certain information. The Hunter looks for something else. The farmer notices time frames and when to plant seed and reap what is sown and when to when to when to. In other words, the farmer looks for predictability and what is predictable.
A hunter, on the other hand, has a different kind of information on his mind. Information that will keep him alive. Yes, he can focus on the deer in the distance that he is moving towards but letting himself get too absorbed into this hunt removes his ability to notice for dangers at the peripherals of his experience. The child with ADHD can't sit still, can't pay attention, can't focus on what the Teacher wants all of their attention on. A child with ADHD, as I've been told has the Hunter Gene. If there is a deer in the distance that I as a hunter am hunting, maybe there is another animal hunting that deer too. A tiger for all I know. And if it sees me before I see it, I'm in danger. I have to be able to notice for what I'm not immediately noticing for.
So yes, what are the tracks I'm watching for? What do they mean? But also ... what may or may not following me. What's trying to hunt me, do you see? So, I'm paying attention to what isn't directly in the center of my focus by noticing for movement and shifts in weather patterns or a particular scent I wasn't looking for but that has found me that I need to notice as soon as it shows up in my experience so I can identify the threat. It's the ability of the hunter to notice for unpredictability and what is unpredictable.
I've been trying to figure out how to say all this because I've been noticing a friend of mine regularly sharing ideas regarding ADHD and the like that I couldn't help but to see flaws in which means I'm speaking to this idea from a book called ADHD: A Hunter in a Farmer's World. Apparently, the school systems manufacture farmers. Those with ADHD tend to in the school system not always be as successful because they functionally focus more on what is unpredictable rather than the current education systems way of predictably doing things in a certain way every time over and over again. School begins in autumn, ends in spring. Specific times for classwork. Homework needs to be back when it is said to be back. On and on and on. Predictability wherever the farmer is whereas the Hunter's is anything but.
Now, the goal then becomes not to make the imbalance between the hunter and the farmer (unpredictability and predictability) deeper or to try and drive some kind of wedge between these two experiences but to, in my understanding, learn how to bring them more into balance. To, if your inner hunter is already strong, beginning to learn how you can feed and exercise your inner farmer. Or if you're already on high alert all the time looking for danger, your inner hunter in and of itself may in fact be out of balance with itself before you ever even try and work out how to make the farmer in you stronger.
So, it's NOT a constant battle. Instead, there's a cohesiveness, a collaboration, a symbiosis if they have ADHD one needs to develop between their hunter gene and the farmer gene if they want to take their life to the next level. Just some thoughts. Someone bought this book for me a long time ago and it certainly is capable of generating a life changing effect for those with eyes to see and ears to hear.
