Yesterday, I drove to one of Rhode Island’s exclusive private beaches. It wasn’t my plan to go there; I just happened upon it in the search for a beautiful space where I could participate in the 2-minute Global Moment of Prayer with Marianne Williamson. I was surprised, because in past visits I have received looks of deep suspicion from the local (all-white) residents. Not so on this day! I was warmly greeted and I was able to walk on the beach without any fear. I had the sense that we were all in this together.
This era— these troubled times — are trying to teach us a lesson. Is anyone resisting it tooth and nail? Wait, I know folks who are and who will try. I know that some hate groups are encouraging members sick with the virus to go to public spaces (synagogues, etc.) to deliberately infect people they hate. Hate translates as: “Fuck my impact on you, I don’t care, I refuse to take responsibility. My behavior speaks for me …”
I had to say that … and now I’ll move on.
First lesson: Is about interconnectedness. It’s a word for a deep and ancient and beautiful idea.
To explain this lesson, let’s think about what the highlights of this era should have been: the Big Giant, Audacious Goals.
Coronavirus is currently turning all of our lives upside down. In the movie “Contagion,” a virus jumped species—it jumped from a bat, to a pig and then to a human. Think about it. A bat to a pig? The story goes something like this. A bat ate a banana. If I am recalling this correctly, the bat was infected. The infected bat then somehow (I don’t remember exactly how) came in contact with the pig. The story illuminated that it was remarkable that the bat and the pig were even in contact with each other … they were an unlikely pair. Then the pig was killed and sold to a chef at a restaurant in China. As he was preparing the meal, the chef wiped his hands on his apron before going to shake the hand of an American, who was so thrilled with the meal that she wanted to meet him. The American flew home from China the next day, unknowingly infecting some of the other passengers on the plane. Several days later, the American died.
And then, because there weren’t enough hospitals—that virus spread rapidly around the globe.
This story is a clear demonstration of our interconnectedness.
Do you see how we are all connected?
We are all connected, dependent, in this together. But that is meant in a deeper and far more profound way than we might typically think about.
Connectedness is our nature. We are social creatures, little lost things clinging to one another on a ball of mud flung through the endless darkness. When I put it that way, it’s not too hard to see just why connectedness is so vital, so crucial, why our worlds soon come undone without it. Because that is just what happens.
When we deny the value and worth of connectedness — the genuine human-being thing — then our worlds soon start to fall apart.
Second lesson: We are learning that negligence and indifference are moral corrosions. There are “Rebellions that dog our every step.” Hate and purposefully wanting to infect someone just because they don’t care about their impact or care about taking personal responsibility. That ideology is what I would consider morally corrosive and indifferent because it has no true purpose. I think that what folks who hold these types of beliefs want is the exact same thing that you and I want, which is to be connected, valued and respected.
As such, these troubling and uncertain times are teaching us that every word and action must have a more powerful meaning and a higher purpose.
It is trying to tell us what we have always been: connected in a web of life that is more beautiful, strange, complex, and improbable than we have yet to understand or consider. No longer must we break any strand of this web of interconnectedness — or the result is the age of uncertainty, moral corrosion, indifference, corruption and ruin we see now stretching in front of us.
I’ve been writing about and teaching my clients these concepts for years because they are the very core of Imago therapy. And now more than ever, it is my deepest hope we are learning that we need gigantic new goals, fundamentally grounded in the notion of connectedness.
All of us deserve to be seen, held, known, cherished in the full and desperate fragility, to be genuinely related to, nourished, considered inherently worthy — not just reduced to profiles and avatars, which only fuel the vicious circle and cycle of dehumanization now so visible at the vicious heart of this new century.
We’ve been numbing ourselves to it all with the cheap pleasures of another dopamine rush from the tap and the swipe. We’ve been playing a foolish game — and by pretending that we know each other, when we don’t, care for each other when we don’t, real interconnectedness only becomes more elusive. We grow lonely and afraid and we feel small. We tap the screen compulsively, seeking just an ember of true relationship. The cycle has become vicious. Our worlds have been cheated of real connection in this way.
Real, genuine interconnection is hard, difficult, painful, work — but it is also the most rewarding work of all. It is me spending the time, putting in the energy, “doing the work,” to really feel what you feel, see what you see, hold what you hold.
Any institution or system built on a lesser moral imperative than that will fail in a era where the weight and density of connectedness determine the success of an organization, whether it’s a society, town, city, community, enterprise or our homes.
We have become people without vision and courage and grace. And that way lies the end of a time of progress. The question in front of us is: are we wise enough to dream beautiful and worthy dreams once again?
In radical connection and gratitude,
Paula
