The only protection I can offer [my son] is allowing him to see everything with his own eyes so he can confront just how vulnerable life is.
—EMAD BURNAT, A PALESTINIAN PHOTOGRAPHER
IT’S TAKEN YEARS, but I’m beginning to understand that chasing Paradise keeps us from living here in paradise. It’s the journey and process that matter, not where we’re going or where we think we’re going.
Initially, we’re pulled into life, drawn into a thoroughness that brings us alive. But once in the thick of it, we get tangled in the details and start to map and manage life instead of living it. When encumbered this way, life seems to be other than where we are. Or so we think. Until some shock of love or suffering jars us into a state of thoroughness that brings us back alive.
Sometimes we think we can study our way out of our entanglements. But though we can map a frog’s innards, we can’t know the life of a frog by pinning it to a board—any more than we can know the life of a person by naming their psychology, or the life of a community by naming its ideology. Because nothing stands still, not us or the Universe we wake in. Everything is shifting—breaking through, growing, blossoming, shedding, turning to mulch, and breaking ground again. We can only know life by living it.
In her novel The Lake and the Lost Girl, Jacquelyn Vincenta says, “[People] will get angry if you try to take their stories away … because those stories are their personal maps of the world.”
And yet we’re constantly challenged to drop below our own story in order to understand and feel the Whole of Life that is always beyond our own particular map. Otherwise, we make everything conform to our biased view of life. Otherwise, we superimpose the silhouette of our wounds and slights on everyone we meet. Otherwise, we remain trapped in our own web of assumptions and conclusions and never grow. Soon, we’re prisoners of our own perception, mistaking the map for the earth it represents, mistaking our assumptions and conclusions for the unnameable reality we move through. Then we can easily dismiss anything or anyone that doesn’t fit our personal map of life.
Here’s a telling example. In the 1960s, American sociologists characterized the Burmese people as being overrun with “economic irrationality,” because these reflective village people emphasized the spiritual over the material. The anthropologist Melford Spiro remarked at the time, “They build pagodas, support monasteries, and maintain monks, while they themselves reside in thatched huts, live on simple fare, and so on.” The anthropologist George Foster added, “They spend lavishly on religious displays, and manifest little interest in saving (much less investing) … they are, it is often said, ‘improvident.’”
I’m reminded of the anonymous graffiti found in a bathroom in Georgia that reads, “Those who don’t hear the music think the dancers mad.” Improvident and irrational according to who?
Clearly, a deeper providence and reasoning guides the Burmese people to care for the invisible threads that keep all of life connected, a providence and reasoning inaudible to those obsessed with the accumulation of wealth. This raises a fundamental difference between the mind of self-interest and the heart of impeachable connection. The mind of self-interest is fueled by the concept of ownership, while the heart of connection renews itself by participating in the circulation of life-force between all living things. While the mind of self-interest is forever engaged in the push-pull of have and have not, the heart of connection is forever engaged in the give-and-take of what keeps us all alive. The self-referential map of these anthropologists, no matter how well educated, precluded their inquiry into a story different from their own.
Humbly, when chasing wealth, we’re distracted from discovering the richness inherent in our lives. When chasing love, we’re distracted from the love we trip over en route to what we think is a greater love. And when chasing fame and celebrity, we’re distracted from the nest of our own worth and miss the things around us to celebrate.
Beneath our inevitable entanglements in the details of life, beneath our want to study our way out of these entanglements, beneath our dependence on our personal maps of the world, each of us carries a portion of the Universal Spirit that lives in all of us. Just as the air that resides in our lungs is very personal, though it’s comprised of the common air that makes up the atmosphere, the portion of Spirit that is ours to carry in this incarnation is very personal, though the Spirit our soul is made of is Universal.
As we breathe, we take in air until it fills our lungs. Once inside us, it’s impossible to discern what part of that air is yours or mine and what part came from the sky. Likewise, as our heart breathes, we take in Spirit from the Universe until it fills our individual soul. Once inside us, it’s impossible to discern what part of the vastness of Spirit is yours or mine and what part came from the timeless reservoir of Spirit. As healthy lungs keep us alive by exchanging the air that flows in and out of us, a healthy heart keeps us vital by exchanging the Spirit that flows in and out of us.
Earlier, I mentioned the traditional Hindu greeting namaste, which means “I honor the piece of the Universe that resides in you.” Implicit in this greeting, always offered with a bow, is the acknowledgment that, unique and individual as we are, we carry the same timeless Spirit within us. And so our personal stories mix with the One Story we’re all a part of, whether we acknowledge this or not.
When we can live our stories and not be ruled by them, we love ourselves into being. There is a Spanish saying, Se tu vida, which means “Be your life.” This is all that is asked of us. And yet, in doing so, we can get lost in all that living engenders.
No one can determine what it means for you to be your life. We simply need to be who we are everywhere. Every time we manage to do this, it adds to our strength and view of the Whole and empowers others to be who they are everywhere. In this way, we water the seeds of decency, always in our care.
We’re constantly challenged to drop below our own story in order to understand and feel the Whole of Life that is always beyond our own particular map.