At Play among Lifeworlds

Synesthesia of patterns of engagement and care

Lifeworlds are patterns of engagement and care

When I was young, I lived with my family in a small town of 12,000 people. I biked around tobacco fields, played 2-on-2 Nerf football, and shot up young saplings with BB guns. That is the culture I was actually engaged in.

On TV, there were soap opera fantasies about wealthy people, or mismatched-roommate sit-coms in some big city. I enjoyed seeing images of those cultures, could talk about them…but if, as a ten-year-old boy, I was placed in the role of a bachelor in New York City with an incompatible roommate, my attempts to live in that manner would have been a crude reproduction of the most visible patterns of engagement. I would not share the same cares and concerns as an adult bachelor, nor understand the ordinary patterns of everyday life not characterized on TV: how do I select what to wear? Where do I shop for groceries? How do I relate to my extended family?

This is the difference between a lifeworld and a culture appreciated from an outside view.

In anthropology, a distinction is made between the inside and outside view of a culture. Some anthropologists have embedded with groups in order to get an inside view. An inside view is closer to a lifeworld than outside view, but more than engaging in the patterns of a culture is to actually adopt its cares and concerns.

For example, we can explore a tradition of cockfighting in Bali with the outside view when watching a documentary and bring an orientation concerning animal welfare. An inside view can be teased out by living in the local community for a year, and having numerous informal conversations with the cockfighting participants, discovering the details of how winning and losing cockfights impacts local community status. The lifeworld, however, is not known until there is full “going native”: finding oneself with the same concerns as the cockfighters. In the case of Balinese cockfighting, it would be to develop a felt-sense of how the results of a cockfight impacted your status similar to the participants, including true dejection upon losing, and a fervent desire to improve your status via cockfighting.

Possible and impossible realities

A lifeworld is an accomplished pattern of engagement and care.

In an ordinary moment, patterns of engagement and care are available, effortlessly. Consider the man who has dressed in a suit for work for years, and cares how it presents to others: they have an accomplished pattern of engagement and care. Contrast that either to a man who has just started wearing suits, and isn’t quite sure how to tie a tie, or a man who wears a suit, but does so because they view it as a necessity and would rather not. The former does not have an accomplished pattern of engagement; the latter does not have an accomplished pattern of care. In both cases, the initial weak patterns of engagement and care may grow until they bloom into a lifeworld.

Each lifeworld is a reality. Each of us has many possible and many impossible realities.

Realities can be unavailable as a matter of practicality of engagement: I do not expect that I will ever find myself engaging in the elitist literary circles around the French Sorbonne. I have missed that window of opportunity.

Realities can be unavailable as a matter of desire for engagement: I could probably move to a small town in Canada and “go native”. On the other hand, I feel no pull to do so.

Realities can be unavailable as a matter of possibilities of care and concern: I could easily engage in the culture of any political faction in my town. Would I ever actually be able to take on caring about the same issues, with sufficient depth? This move from engagement to actual care is something discovered. One cannot care about something through force of will. Actual engagement can either fan or quench the flames of care. Will I like jazz piano more or less ten years after taking up the hobby of playing jazz piano? The idea that I might, may motivate me to engage, but only time will reveal if I actually care to dwell in that lifeworld.

Finally, realities can be unavailable as a matter of duration of engagement. To become a skilled participant in a culture takes time. A year of engagement is often a speed-run; five years of engagement is more often a reasonable minimum duration. There are only so many realities that can be entered into in a lifetime.

Seen from an outside view, some possible lifeworlds attract me. Perhaps I see someone running a race. That can draw me into preliminary patterns of engagement and care: I start a running practice. The lifeworld of being a “runner” is becoming more possible. Perhaps I find over time, though, that never develop care for running beyond “I might grow to care about this”. I never enter the lifeworld of “runner.”

Perhaps I find myself not only skillfully engaged in running, but caring deeply about running concerns: I want to win the next race, I follow a five-year training plan. At some point, “runner” becomes an actual lifeworld for me. Perhaps an eccentric lifeworld is discovered, something seems both connected and distinct from the lifeworld of running as it is now known. This can clearly be seen in cultural evolution, where, for example, the art of family cooking evolves decade-by-decade, seemingly continuous in the short term, but in the long-term creating the distance in lifeworld between an ancient recipe on how to prepare larks’ tongue in aspic and a modern recipe on how to prepare a microwave lava cake, and a change in care with respect to meals: to what degree is are meals filled with care about family, health, efficiency?

Attraction leads to investment in engagement; investment in engagement becomes skillful engagement; skill may be accompanied by matching care. Only then, when care and skillful engagement are both readily available, is a new lifeworld present for me.

As real as it gets

Our reality appears differently according to lifeworld, according to our patterns of engagement and care. Our present reality is as real as it gets.

When I was a child in rural Georgia, I had patterns of engagement and care involving nature. Moving to Boston as a teenager, I developed stronger patterns of engagement and care for academics, and weaker for nature. Eventually, some of what had been real to me in Georgia was no longer real to me in Boston. Life continued; my patterns of engagement and care have no final resting place; they continually drift and transmute, even in the absence of dissatisfaction or a search for other lifeworlds.

When I visited my childhood town in my 30s, I visited with a new lifeworld, of being a married Northern Californian, my childhood patterns long ago faded, but leaving faint traces, not disappeared entirely. The massive iron merry-go-round of my favorite childhood playground was an enjoyable spin but could no longer provide the same thrill of adventure. The driveway of my old house was no longer felt as an impromptu basketball court.

In each moment of my life, my current patterns of engagement and care are my reality. The lifeworld I am in in each moment is as real as it gets. There is no final or ultimate pattern of engagement and care that is the “right” or “true” one. There is no basis from which to make a choice as to which of my available lifeworlds (or variants) to inhabit, except, perhaps, being present to the felt-sense of all that is happening, being present to all the possible patterns of interaction, and discovering what seems the best lifeworld to enter in this moment, staying open that I might change my direction at any time.

At this point in my life, multiple realities are available to me in every ordinary moment: there is my family culture, my work culture, my gym culture…changing the context and circumstances effortlessly changes my reality.

We can call each of these realities “reality as it appears to me, at the moment”. And, others have “reality as it appears to them, at the moment”. As there is no “really real” reality, no ultimate reality, each of these realities is as real as it gets. There is no ultimate distinction between Reality and Appearance, dancing between my lifeworlds, my available patterns of engagement and care.

An analogy is seeing shapes in clouds. This is a responsive interaction with the clouds, neither pure mental creation nor a pure material creation. I can see the shapes in the clouds that I can see, but many hypothetical ways of seeing shapes in the clouds are not available to me. If someone says, “look at that bunny!”, maybe I can see it, maybe I can’t. My reality is the particular shape I see a cloud as now. That shape is also how the cloud appears to me.

My living pattern of engagement and care is the “shape” that I am seeing in vast dimensional “clouds” of potentiality. That “shape” is my reality at the moment. That “shape” is also how vast dimensional “clouds” of potentiality are appearing to me; they could appear otherwise. However, there is no sifting out of the Reality and Appearance, of seeing the vast dimensional “clouds” of potentiality “as they really are”. The only extreme alternative to a particular pattern of engagement and care is no pattern of engagement and care; this results in the simultaneous vanishing of Reality and Appearance: complete disengagement without care.

When our differing realities coincide in time and space, they frequently resonate with and shape each other. Part of the thrill of romantic love can be discovering and starting to inhabit a partially-shared lifeworld. Studying under a teacher of a craft can draw you into their lifeworld. This influence of pattern-on-pattern can also be reactive, a formation of a lifeworld created on the basis of intentional rejection of someone else’s lifeworld, such as identities built on “not being a normie”. Lifeworlds are not solitary bubbles, but fields of patterning endlessly resonating with and altering each other.

Reality appears differently in each moment. Patterns of engagement, care, and concern have no ultimate necessary coherence, so there is no “greater reality”. The way a lifeworld appears when inhabiting a pattern of engagement, care, and concern is the experienced reality of each moment.

Synesthesia of lifeworlds

A lifeworld may have fixed structures of engagement and care. In everyday society, for instance, it is inappropriate to be without pants or underpants, naked in the lower half of my body. When fully entering a lifeworld, we find a capacity to fluidly move within the constraints of these structures: I may wear many sorts of clothing downtown, but always with something on my lower body. If we take improvisation to mean a non-prescribed form of action, we can say that a lifeworld delineates improvisatory moves: there are constraints on my improvisation, but immense freedom within those limits.

We could consider each lifeworld as a language of improvisation; like a language, there are constraints (grammar) that can be bent, and almost limitless possibilities of expression. Yet, there is always subtle patterning there: to speak in avant garde French poetry is not to speak in avant garde English poetry, however much each may bend the apparent constraints of the languages.

As I’ve come to have more actually-available lifeworlds, I find myself in each moment with an array of potential lifeworlds I could enter into. Is this a moment for family culture? For work culture? For gym culture? This is an expansive version of what linguists call “code-switching”, talking in different styles depending on the context: formally at work, in “bro speak” at the gym, in baby-speak with an infant. It is “reality-switching”: different complex patterns of interaction, care, and concern becoming the lived reality in different circumstances.

This isn’t a rational, intellectual consideration, but a felt-sense surfing on the possibilities of the moment. The potential lifeworlds glitter like the play of sunlight on water. It is a non-prescribed "move" to enter into one, or to release one and enter another, as seems most appropriate. 

Potential lifeworlds, released of a sense of "this is the FUNDAMENTAL reality," or the search for a fundamental reality, and free of imposed demand for overarching coherence, can be experienced synesthetically, each potential lifeworld full of resonances with other lifeworlds. How is being a Bostonian who was once a Georgia boy different from being a Bostonian who was once from London? How is being a Bostonian who lifts weights but doesn’t play video games different from being a Bostonian who plays video games but doesn’t lift weights?

Relaxing into the felt-sense, reality-switching loses discreteness, start to blur into each other a little, realities become seeds of artistic possibility. Allowing a little gym culture into work culture. Allowing a little work culture into family culture. Allowing a little family culture into gym culture.

“Spontaneity” can be opposed to “improvisation.” Improvisation is the daily life within a lifeworld. In spontaneity, action is not limited to a lifeworld, but may freely draw from all lifeworlds, and perhaps add a unique artistic twist.

This moment is filled with my potential patterns of engagement and care. When this possibility space of lifeworlds coalesces into an actually engaged pattern of interaction, then the reality of the moment is discovered and displayed, leading to concrete engagement. The effects of that engagement may bring a new circumstance, and a new lifeworld. By inhabiting the lifeworld of “someone looking for a spouse,” I may eventually find myself in the lifeworld of “parent.”

Play in the lifeworlds

What attitudes might arise from this consideration?

• Searchlessness: the relaxing and dropping of a search for ultimate reality, for what is really real.

• Engagement and Care: Not kidding yourself about what it means to inhabit a lifeworld: a durational investment, perhaps many years, of engagement and care.

• Disengagement and Letting Go of Care: Not kidding yourself about what it may mean to leave a lifeworld: a durational relaxing of engagement and care, perhaps over many years.

• Responsive Power: An attitude in communicating across lifeworlds that comes from realizing that others’ lifeworlds are both just as real as yours and just as much mere appearance as yours. Sometimes there can be no alignment in cares and concerns. How does one pattern align with another? What is the alignment of the pattern of a lava lamp and a magnetic field? You can move forward with your cares and concerns, being present to others’ realities, without requiring a perhaps-impossible coherence.

Searchlessly, playing in the lifeworlds that arise from engagement and care, responsive power manifests through spontaneous action.

At Play among Lifeworlds

The sunlight is the synesthesia of potential life-worlds.

The context and circumstances are the water.

The endlessly changing play of sunlight on water is the recognition of this moment's potential.

An evocative shape is recognized in the play of sunlight: a guiding vision spontaneously clarifies from inchoate visionary possibility and is infused with energy.

In the appreciation of that shape, spontaneously, a particular engagement arises, yielding manifestation.