There are people whose presence is encouraging. One of the most beautiful gifts in the world is the gift of encouragement. When someone encourages you, that person helps you over a threshold you might otherwise never have crossed on your own. There are times of great uncertainty in every life. Left alone at such a time, you feel dishevelment and confusion like gravity. When a friend comes with words of encouragement, a light and lightness visit you and you begin to find the stairs and the door out of the dark. The sense of encouragement you feel from the friend is not simply her words or gestures; it is rather her whole presence enfolding you and helping you find the concealed door. The encouraging presence manages to understand you and put herself in your shoes. There is no judgement but words of relief and release.
Encouragement also helps you to engage and trust your own possibility and potential. Sometimes you are unable to see the special gift that you bring to the world. No gift is ever given for your private use. To follow your gift is a calling to a wonderful adventure of discovery. Some of the deepest longing in you is the voice of your gift. The gift calls you to embrace it, not to be afraid of it. The only way to honour the unmerited presence of the gift in your life is to attend to the gift; this is also a most difficult path to walk. Each gift is different; there is no plan or programme you can get ready-made from someone else. The gift alone knows where its path leads. It calls you to courage and humility. If you hear its voice in your heart, you simply have to follow it. Otherwise your life could be dragged into the valley of disappointment. People who truly follow their gift find that it can often strip their lives and yet invest them with a sense of enrichment and fulfilment that nothing else could bring. Those who renege on or repress their gift are unwittingly sowing the seeds of regret.
Some people have a blurred presence. For some reason, so many thoughts and bands of feeling criss-cross simultaneously in their personalities that you can never, finally, decide where you are with them. Their presence is distracted and confused. There is no line or contour you can finally follow. Such presences are usually self-absorbed and have neither clarity nor a sense of clearance around them to enable them to attend or engage with anyone else. When such a person is manager or chairperson of a group or company, there is neither vision nor an effective or clear resolution of anything.
Anger is a great flame of presence. It is difficult to mistake or ignore any angry presence. Usually anger is like fire. It starts with a spark and then multiplies in a rapid exponential rhythm. Anger wants to break out; it stops us in our tracks. Much of the time we avoid conflict; we put up with things. We let things go. When the flame of anger rises, it confronts things. Anger shouts, “Stop!” It can be a great force for change. It is so encouraging to hear the voice of righteous anger raised. It names and confronts injustice. It brings clearly to light whatever is wrong and makes it clear to the perpetrators of injustice what they are doing. It is very interesting to notice how politically incorrect anger now is. Especially in these times, there are so many issues that should warrant great anger. The psychologist James Hillmann remarks in his devastatingly incisive way that psychotherapy has managed to convert anger into anxiety. If one becomes angry on television, one immediately loses the trust of the audience. Whatever common denominator of propriety television exercises, it seems that an angry presence, even when it is fully justified, still only manages to evoke sympathy for the target of the anger and the diminution of the presence of the angered one. Perhaps this only confirms even more trenchantly that television manages to depict only image and never real presence. Anger disrupts the fluent sequence of images and makes awareness awkward.
There are some people who seem to manage almost permanent anger. Every time you meet them, there is something new drawing their anger. Such people never relent. They are victims of a fire that started somewhere further back, but continues to flare up on every new ground they enter. There are also people who are constantly nice; they are always pleasing and accommodating. They never lose their composure; they give nothing away. Yet, if you really watch them, you will begin to detect a quiet fury behind the mask of niceness. It would be wonderful for them if even once they could unleash the fury with no concern for the situation in which they find themselves. It would limber up their personalities, and they would experience the immense relief of realizing that they did not need to desperately court approval in the first place.
