The document discusses the concepts of orientation, disorientation, and new orientation. It explores how people experience innocence initially, then suffering during times of disruption or change, before achieving greater knowledge and wisdom through intervention and internalization, resulting in a new perspective. Sections are devoted to exploring these concepts in life, learning, and literature.
39. The Way It Is
by William Stafford
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about whatthe thread.
you are pursuing.
Youit is hardexplain about see.
have to for others to
But you hold it you can’t get lost.
While
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer andtime’s unfolding.
get old.
Nothing you do can stop thread.
You don’t ever let go of the
The origins of the ODONO model are the work of Walter Brueggemann and his work on the psalms, which he divided into three categories: psalms of orientation, disorientation, and new orientation.
But the meaning of the model is, for me, much more personal, for at that time, my father was dying from cancer, I was moving (at about 32) toward that phase when one feels they have developed a foundation for their work that leads one to feel a bit restless--Is this really what I will do for the rest of my life?--but had not yet begun to write books, etc.; we were months away from our second child (Whitman); my father-in-law, a man I respected deeply, was nearing his own death from esophogal cancer; we had a 3 year-old son; and, of course, school was about to start. It was a period of deep, nearly uninterrupted, multi-faceted Disorientation.
But ODONO is as much a way to think about literature and learning, even leading--a group, a company, a class or team--as it is a way to think about life.
The straight line represents the status quo, the stable system, reality, or world as we know it to be--whether good or bad. It is simply our perspective, our experience--our truth up till this point.
It is school, teaching, students--the world as we have known it and expect it to be.
Brueggemann speaks of “propos[ing] a movement and dynamic among the Psalms that suggests an interrelatedness, without seeking to impose a rigid scheme upon the poems, which must be honored...in [their] own distinctiveness” (Spirituality and the Psalms, 7)
Interruption is the event that leads to the condition, state, or general feeling of Disorientation.
It is, in some respects, best represented by Tassim’s notion of the Black Swan, as well as his remarks that we “think in stories” which we assume will always be true and which guide our thinking such that we cannot naturally anticipate such interruptions as they have never been, till now, part of the story one is living. Everything you have ever thought was true remains true--up to the exact moment when it is not, at which time the narrative must restructure itself.
The Four Noble Truths of the Buddhists are: 1. Suffering (dukkha). Life is suffering within the mind and/or body; only when we recognize and acknowledge the presence of such suffering can we begin to address it.
ODONO might suggest that such suffering stems from the feeling or effects of Disorientation; as the Greeks say, suffering is the way to wisdom; the Buddhists say that to resolve suffering, one needs “the help of a teacher and Sangha, friends in the practice (i.e., in ODONO, some form of Intervention).
Suffering is not fundamentally bad; often, it seems necessary as a step toward clarity.