Engagement: Integration of Centering and Balancing as a Faithful “Way of Being”
Palmer (1990, p. 76) recounts the statement made by one of his colleagues: “I have never asked myself if I was being effective, but only if I was being faithful.” It is in the testing of faithfulness that we find a joining together of centering and balancing. We engage the turbulent river knowing that we must be agile. We must move back and forth as our world reacts to our actions. We learn and adjust. Yet, with all of this movement and adaptation, we also must remain “faithful” to a centering set of core values. Our ultimate concern must be kept in mind as we address the many immediate concerns associated with navigating the turbulent white water. This focus on faithfulness and ultimate concerns requires us to look through the first facet of our Lens of Essence. This a facet that provides clarity regarding zero-order, nonchanging values and priorities.
Peter Vail offers an insight-rich way of envisioning the learning-based, zero-order integration of centering and balancing while navigating the whitewater environment. He writes about learning as a way of being: (Vaill, 1996, p. 43)
“Leaming in permanent white water is learning as a way of being. That equation is my basic point of departure. . . . Permanent white water is not just a collection of facts and events external to us. It is felt—as confusion and loss of direction and control, as a gnawing sense of meaninglessness. If learning is to be a major means of restoring our understanding of the world around us, the learning process itself should not add to our feeling of meaninglessness. Yet this is precisely what the institutional learning model tends to do as it renders the learner passive and dependent, inundates the learner with great volumes of miscellaneous subject matter presented as absolutely essential knowledge, and then erects a powerful set of extrinsic rewards and punishments to keep the learner’s focus on all this jumbled and largely meaningless content. By inadvertently creating meaningless learning experiences, institutional learning exacerbates white water problems and leaves the learner unsure of how he or she is ever going to live effectively in the chaotic organizations of the present and future.”
It is at this point that Vaill (1996, p. 43) broadens the concept of learning-as-a-way-of-being:
“In the phrase learning as a way of being, being refers to the whole person—to something that goes on all the time and that extends into all aspects of a person’s life; it means all our levels of awareness and, indeed, must include our unconscious minds. If learning as a way of being is a mode for everyone, being then must include interpersonal being as well as personal socially expressive being—my learning as a way of being will somehow exist in relation to your learning as a way of being. In short, there are no boundaries to being. . . .”
Clearly, as Peter Vaill (1996, p. 43) notes: “learning as a way of being is a very capacious idea.”
As with all approaches to finding the Essence of something, Vaill notes that learning-as-a-way-of-being is not to be found on a list. While Vaill identified several specific modes of learning—which I have enumerated and expanded on in one of my essays on Essentials (Bergquist, 2024)—he believes that they are fully integrated with one another. That which is the Essence of something comes to us as a single, unified entity (Vaill, 1996, p. 51):
“Learning as a way of being is a whole mentality. It is a way of being in the world. . . . .[The various modes of learning] are twists of the learning kaleidoscope. They should not be thought of as having independent existence or as items that we can work on one at a time. More than just a skill, learning as a way of being is a whole posture toward experience, a way of framing or interpreting all experience as a learning opportunity or learning process.”
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