Building a way out: on ‘thrownness’

I am sick of being inundated with horrors. I have felt voiceless and tossed about. Maybe you’ve felt it too? A fear of posting the wrong thing, of sharing something other than bad news. Like there is no place for beauty. When in reality, we need beauty more than ever.

Amar D. Peterman’s article on the common good in the latest issue of The Christian Century articulates exactly what I’m feeling. “As the world acts upon us, we also act upon the world.”

We also act upon the world. With beauty. With goodness and with truth.

From the essay:

In Being and Time, philosopher Martin Heidegger identifies the experience of “thrownness.” This language aptly describes the experience: a sense of being tossed into the world like a rock down a steep forest slope, knocking against trees and hurling through thick brush. Thrownness is the humbling moment when we become aware of all the countless forces and choices that act upon us. It arises when we stop and ask ourselves, How did I get here? It is the realization that we are who we are because of the people around us and the places we exist.

Thrownness, though, goes two ways. We are not only thrown, we are also throwers. As the world acts upon us, we also act upon the world. By interacting with others, we become one of many forces that our friends and neighbors recognize in their own experience of thrownness. There is relational reciprocity here of giving and receiving, of acting and being acted upon. Thrownness reminds us that we are always dependent on our environment, never above or beyond its formative power. We are enmeshed in tangled webs of interdependence where we are at once being formed and forming others. Recognizing our thrownness humbles us.

In Conversation—the Sacred Art, Diane Millis talks about increasing our collective awareness of the sacred in our midst.

I set this excerpt on a photo I took of an exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Art that explores the diversity of American experience through photographs.

I don’t know about you, but I think that’s a form of resistance. A way of building our way out.

Once more, for good measure:

“We are not only thrown, we are also throwers.” - Amar D. Peterman