Reluctant
St Helena, CA
6 May 2006
For some unfathomable reason, I am sitting with a sense of reluctance right now. Since the only way out is the way in, I have the urge to know this word more intimately. Reluctant comes to us from the Latin pretty much unchanged. As if it were reluctant to make the migration. It means to “struggle against”. The root, luctari, means “to struggle”.
In the past I held reluctant as a state of being – as in “I am reluctant to…” But its roots inform me otherwise. In a strange way, it might be more honest of me to say, “I reluct going deeper into my story in this moment.” Holding it this way I can feel its power. There is a doing here, rather than being in some rigid state of resistance, or posture of indifference.
Where else do I reluct? Do I reluct my commitments? My spirituality? My isolation? No wonder I am tired. So much struggling against without noticing.
If in the moment of my “reluctance”, I were able to reframe the experience, and ask myself a different question, what might then occur? Instead of asking: Why am I reluctant? I might ask: What am I struggling against?
Another word comes to mind for this kind of struggle – contend. How often do I contend with one thing or another? As it happens, contend comes from contendere meaning “to stretch”. Perhaps that is where the word tendon comes from.
So, the struggle itself, the contending, can also be an opportunity to stretch, and in time perhaps to become more resilient. Reluctance, then, need not be passive, and it need not be cowardly. It may well be that my reluctants – be they about commitment, or spirituality, or isolation, or whatever – may actually be stretching and strengthening me for what is to come. And I notice that, holding the word this way, frees me to move, to be less reluctant in the ordinary sense of the word.
I am more aware than ever of how much struggle composes my life. What would my life be like if I were now and then to let go of the struggling against ? What if I were to shift from reluctance to acceptance from time to time? What if?