The Between

selfies at the Statue of Responsibility

My brain-injury had a way of making me pretty self-obsessed.

Constantly having to monitor my environment and my energy had become a survival technique, without which I would risk a state that resembled either being sloppy drunk or in a comatose pill stupor. And things could turn dangerous quick, especially if I was out on my own.

Beyond that, the jumpy paranoia of PTSD locked me in to that developmental stage where everything occurred because of me - everything was personal.

All of this self-preoccupation took up a lot of real estate in my life, not really leaving much room for anyone else.

My good pal, Kelly, who took years to recover from a spinal-cord injury after falling out of a third-floor window, summed it up simply, “I didn’t have the capacity to relate to others. There was just nowhere to fit them.”

If you’re lucky enough to live through them, these kinds of catastrophes plunge you directly into a Dark Night of the Soul, that inhospitable place where your previously held meaning in life has collapsed, and you become fully engrossed in your own dissolution of self.

Not the best at parties.

I knew that if I ever wanted to emerge from my dark cocoon and rejoin the world, I would need to open myself up to other people, including their hang-ups, their projections, their opinions, their schedules, and their physical locations.

I would need to release the white-knuckle grip on my own reality and plunge into the uncertainty of communing with others.

This confrontation with my limits would go on to reveal a deeper truth: that freedom, sometimes, isn’t found in gaining greater control over our own schedule, preferences, and sovereignty, but in allowing ourselves to roll with the rhythms of community.

Perhaps, most radically of all, seeing and accepting our limited powers over our time can prompt us to question the very idea that time is something you use in the first place. But here is an alternative: the unfashionable but powerful notion of letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history.

- Oliver Burkeman,Four Thousand Weeks

Kelly and I are extreme examples of personal safeguarding via separation, obviously, but it seems, now more than ever, that “responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history” has lapsed into striving to ascend our current realities to greater heights, to evolve upwards at all costs, even if it means leaving those behind who don’t fit in with our travel plans.

But, there is no direction to evolution.

A more proper metaphor would be the outward webbing of a bush, not the climbing of a single tree toward the heavens.

Granted, reaching outward is hard.

In Begin Again, we don’t even get to interpersonal relations as a means of mindfulness practice until Week Five, spending the first four weeks building up and stabilizing our own reserves before we can extend it to others.

It’s only when we’ve put in the work of no longer shrinking in our habitual inadequacy and the urge to flee that we can meet people eye-to-eye.

This, of course, entails taking on a greater responsibility, one that may ask of us to make some sacrifices to what we perceive as our personal freedoms. Drag.

But, maybe that’s not exactly what’s happening.

“Freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.”

- Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

And resisting arbitrariness we must!

Though, to open ourselves to this kind of freedom does require letting go of some control, even easing up a bit on our self agency, something we’re continually told to hold up no matter what.

Relaxing into this kind of mutuality instead of a more isolated and heavily bounded sense of self, we may even find there is not such a rigid divide in our interactions with others- that both sides can just arise and be witnessed.

Then! We can finally notice the between: the third entity, the relationship, that manifests between ourselves and others.

Connecting to the between, instead of just the other person themselves, softens and opens that space and us, so we feel capable of taking the responsibility for the kind of relational moments we are creating, both in our place and our moment in history.

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