There is only us...
Have you considered how we as individuals and as a society seem to play out the same patterns generation after generation? We always seem to make only incremental changes, as if committed to learning only from our own mistakes rather than those of our forebears. We are witness to the accumulated wisdom—though often considered trite— from various elders in our tribe:“money doesn’t make you happy,” “relationships are the most important things in life,” “career and appearance are secondary to love and connection,” “happiness isn’t happiness unless shared.” More often than not we just can’t seem to integrate these maxims into our lives, maybe because they are in conflict with most of the other things we’re being told in our day-to-day existence. Although we might agree on some level with these old adages, most of us are swept up by capitalism’s hypnotic promises. We strive for wealth and worldly success, sometimes at the cost of relationships or personal health, even at the cost of the planet. Why do we keep doing this? Why do we resist the wisdom we have accrued about how we ‘ought to’ live?
We know we are destroying the planet. We’ve known about the effects of burning fossil fuels for decades; we’ve long known about the impact using so much plastic has on the earth and how pretty much every industry contributes towards the degradation of some or other facet of the biosphere. Many of us try to do ‘our bit.’ We may feel some guilt or shame, we recycle, shop second hand, cut animal products from our diet, carpool, and yet it’s never quite enough and we know that. The problems seem insurmountable and ultimately we feel powerless and defeated in the face of them.
What is it about us that we can’t seem to make the changes necessary to steer us off the road headed to annihilation?
What is going on with us?
We are in a constant state of wanting, sometimes we don’t even know what for. We have a deep wound, a collective sense of separation that hurts so much we will do whatever it takes to try to escape the discomfort. We incessantly seek what we believe will make us happy. Our perpetual amnesia makes us forget all the times we got exactly what we wanted only to get bored and want something else soon after, starting when we were children at Christmas or on a birthday. Few of us realise that the pleasure experienced from getting what you want doesn’t last, and the more things you accumulate the returns diminish with depressing rapidity. So how do we make ourselves happy then and is it what we are really looking for?
Perhaps happiness is not what we are alive for. Perhaps we’ve been barking up the wrong proverbial tree this whole time. Maybe what we’ve really all been searching for is connection, and, on top of devastating the natural world, we’ve been stepping over each other, the very source of the thing we’re looking for, to chase this other goal that offers a poor, temporary and hollow substitute.
I will never forget the week my grandmother had a stroke. She lived next-door to my parents in the house I grew up in in Cape Town, South Africa. My grandmother was a strong woman, the matriarch of our rather large extended family and the last living of her generation. We all gathered around and spent the week leading up to her eventual passing taking turns at her bedside holding the hand on the side of her body that wasn’t paralysed. The energy in the house during that week was unlike anything I’d ever experienced; emotional but calm and very honest. It feels impossible to be dishonest around death, whatever pretence or performativity that often comes with being around family just dissolved and we were all in this state of somber closeness, united by the mutual affection for this beloved woman. During this week I was confronted with the idea that closeness and connection are sensations that are more fulfilling and life-affirming and even pleasurable than I’d ever experienced happiness to be. I learned that connection feels better than happiness, even if that connection was felt through sorrow, a shared experience of grief and loss.
When we think about the human race, then societal structures, then families, and then individuals, we see how we are just smaller units making up one great organism. In the west this is more of an intellectual idea than a heartfelt understanding. We are raised to see ourselves as separate from each other when the truth of our world is this: there is no “us” and “them” there is only “us”. And “WE” are reaching a turning point in our collective story where we have an opportunity to disrupt the cycles of fear and destruction that have wreaked havoc on our world for too long. Framing this turning point as an opportunity and not a necessity—although it is also that—allows us to move away from the guilt-based impulse that has proven to be not super successful and helps shift our focus to our interconnectedness.
Although it may seem counterintuitive, it might be true that in order to heal the collective wound and thus heal the world, we first need to heal as individuals; like cells that make up a body, each one is important, and if at all dysfunctional is in need of attention. It’s so hard to maintain this state of consciousness when we are accustomed to seeing everyone and everything as separate and in a stratified hierarchy: I am more important than someone who is impoverished but less important than a statesman; I will ignore the needs of my homeless brother but willingly and without question offer up my power to my government or a corporation; Animals are less important than us so it’s alright to exploit them; The oceans and forests are not what we believe to be conscious so it’s alright to pollute them. This kind of thinking has placed us in a precarious existential position, and we aren’t even aware that each day we recommit ourselves to the belief in separation that could destroy it all.
We understand on some level that we are all both connected and interdependent; the COVID-19 pandemic showed us clearly and literally the truth of this. Embracing this on a fundamental and intuitive level might take a bit of work, but maybe not the kind you think. This work involves opening the heart.
Can we forgive “us” for what we’ve done? To each other? To the planet? To ourselves? Can we forgive us for creating a society in which we did not feel safe, or cared for, or like we belonged? Can we forgive us for creating a world in which we felt the need to win at the cost of someone losing? Can we forgive us for not making the changes we needed to make, for not listening or not believing?
We make this world together; we do not merely live in a world others make for us; we are participants in creating our shared reality. We need not create the same world we lived in yesterday, today. Although unlearning years of incultured beliefs and perspectives seems like a mammoth task, especially when so many of the beliefs are unconscious, it is possible because it’s happening all the time. Many of us are doing this work already, remembering who we are as beautiful, loving and whole.
Each generation is new—a blank slate on which we imprint the fear based perception of the world that they inherited from their parents. But it doesn’t have to be.. If we can renew who we believe ourselves to be and what we believe our world to be, we don’t have to pass on the scarcity mentality, the fear, the bigotry, we could see a very different world emerge within a short space of time. The work starts right now in the hearts of each one of us.