I have thin skin. I don’t mean it in a metaphorical sense. It is also quite sensitive. I will often come to know if I am about to get prickly heat a few hours before it pops. It is in very real sense my radar. I stay or don’t stay in places depending on my how my skin is reacting.
One of my most favourite practices for myself and for people I care or coach is ‘Skin care’. Keep it moisturised clean and healthy. Although, I am beginning to suspect there is more to it than that.
Our skin is one of the biggest sense organs of our body. And yet we know so little about it.
The skin is the Boundary. It is both the separator and the connector between self and others. It affects issues of Image, self-worth, intimacy, sense of belonging and power, amongst other things. It’s more than just pretty gift-wrap for our bones and muscles.
The skin protects but it also projects to self and others about our health or lack of it. Our skin quality tells a lot about our mental, physical and emotional state.
When we are feeling stress, your body releases chemicals that can cause inflammation and make your skin even more sensitive – and the opposite is also true. I have learnt, When I say “my skin crawls”, I must pay attention to what is happening in the environment. We get goose bumps for a reasons.
Growing up, I have always been a outdoor person. And my skin would often be cut, burned or bruised. And my grandma even insisted I play without shoes so that the mud ‘touches’ my skin. And so when I had to go visit my parents, I had a nightmare of time for that one month. Mostly because my dad was very particular about “girls” not having cuts and bruises on our skin. My sister well she didn’t have any. But when I went, I just couldn’t avoid.
He would come home in the evening and line the three of us up and check our hands and legs. I am not kidding. And if we had cuts or bruises, which I often did, my mom and us would get scolding. It was ridiculous. And of course I rebelled. The things we do, when we believe we are caring.
The only way I would not get cuts and bruises on my skin, was if I did not go out, and stayed “safe” in the house. When I did not have “skin in the game”. Literally and metaphorically. I was NOT ok with that.
And so just like that, No skin in the game meant we will be safe sure, whatever that means, but we also miss out on all the sun and fun. Was it worth it then? I wonder.
I get quite amused and sometimes annoyed, by people who are more than willing to give, well intentioned, and free advice about ‘actions’ other people should take or not take – in their personal or professional arena – Without being asked. Would they take their own pill, listen to their own advice? I don’t know.
Skin in the game means when you have a personal stake in the outcome.
Giving advice is convenient, when you have no skin in the game. One set of people who unequivocally keep having their skin the game, are entrepreneurs. I personally have a lot of respect for them. They keep putting themselves out there. They try to solve “problems”, the society cannot yet even see.
As Nassim Taleb says, ““Entrepreneurs are heroes in our society. They fail for the rest of us.”
People who are willing to have their skin in the game, have an impact on the world.
Maybe, There is absolute merit in having a skin in the game. For one, the boring detail stuff becomes important. If I have to live in a house, I will pay more attention to smaller details like neighbourhood, leakage, sunlight etc. But If I don’t, then these things don’t really warrant much attention. We can afford to get bored.
We pay more attention and are more awake. We feel more alive. We feel as if we matter. We feel more accountable, when we have skin in the game. We also then get to have a say in the goings on. We have an active role, and are not just drawing room soldiers. Isn’t all this worth the risk?
We all have at some point or the other gone to functions, parties or meetings we did not really care about. There is a certain feeling of Ennui, that comes with no skin in the game.
Yesterday in a client meeting, a colleague suggested we don’t charge for the “days of intervention” but for the actual result and outcome. It made complete sense. We suddenly have more skin in the game. Yes there is more risk and that is what made it suddenly more exciting. I could tell by how my skin tingled.
Perhaps that is what is the issue with how we are living with each other and the planet. We behave as if we have no skin in the game. It’s a warped mental construct, and one that is jeopardising everyone. We behave as if what we do does not matter. We are not paying attention to the details that matter.
When we have personal stakes – we do what it takes
This behaviour was also quite evident during Peak Covid. Till such time, we or someone in our close connection got infected – COVID was something that happened to people out there. People responded very differently to “instruction” when their skin was in the game.
I learnt recently that 90% of the dust we clean in our homes daily is dead skin. Eeww!!! After my initial skin crawling reaction, the reality of that started to settle in.
Which means we do shed skin. It is involuntary and a continuous process. Which means even if there are cuts and bruises and sun burns – we will lose all that. One day. I don’t have 95% of the marks I had when I was growing up. Neither does my sister. But I had lots of Fun. So, what’s the down side?
And perhaps scars are good. They tell stories of skin in the game. We just need to ask people to share a story of a scar or a cut or a stitch. “What happened”- and we will see a whole different human being unfold. The scar has now become a badge of witness of an experience, a whole episode of our life. A signpost for an internal memory.
Also Skin and Age are related. I know of people who refuse to grow old. But they age. And the first sign of ageing is the skin. The boundaries gets stretched and porous. Our skin softens, stretches, and expands. Does not resist gravity. We get pulled by the earth, after all. It becomes more accommodating. We really learn to hang loose as we grow. Before that we are just uptight.
How beautiful it is, I feel. Our skin gently changes, even as it dies everyday. It does that to make room for all that is happening inside and around, the joys, the pains, the hurts, the celebrations, the shocks, the changes. The memories of being touched and held, the pain of being pushed – everything is contained by the skin. It is like a beautiful tapestry of life lived. A memoir of the myriad experiences we have been privileged to have had and be other side of.
True Beauty then, is not skin deep. It is as deep as the Skin.
How can we then NOT have skin in the game? Is it even a choice?
“I don’t want to touch you skin to skin. I want to touch you deeply, beneath the surface, where our real stories lie. Touch you where the fragments of our being are, where the sediment of things that shaped us forms the verdant delta of our human story. I want to bump against you and feel the rush of contact and ask important questions and offer compelling answers, so that together we might learn to live beneath the surface, where the current bears us forward deeper into the great ocean of shared experience. This is how I want to touch and be touched — through beings — so that someday I might discover that even the skin remembers.” – Richard Wagamese
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