Postcards from Equanimity #011
The Blue Marble (courtesy Apollo 17 crew, Dec 1972)
Left: Earth WITH our feelings and views
Right: Earth WITHOUT our feelings and views
Time is running out on 2021 and I dare not presume you will read this whole thing this year. So here is a tl;dr version:
If you think you have a feeling that cannot be felt/understood by anyone else, it’s most likely not true.
If you think that because you know something “clearly” therefore everyone does too, it’s almost certainly not true.
One of my most meaningful personal achievements in 2021 has been a semblance of steady writing; this is the longest I have kept at it. In 2022, I will formally hang the online shingle for my coaching business, with focus on both personal and executive coaching. That is my side gig aspiration. But I look forward to writing more, and regularly. It has been my first true love, something that fulfills me. I am grateful to each of you, and hope you will stay with me, with more to come.
Though I am inspired to share something, a traditional month by month review seems inadequate. I mean we all probably had the same year, right? Didn’t travel unless we had to, some people we know (or we) got sick, hopefully got better, kids are at home and bored, and the world is basically doom and gloom. Okay, there were probably some great outcomes to share but they generally pale in comparison to the misery of the pandemic.
So instead of a temporal commentary, I am driven to share a concept that has been with me for some time but I have had difficulty in formulating the communication. It doesn’t do much for 2021 but I hope it will inform our 2022. Let’s give it a shot together.
The politicization of the pandemic is the latest round of maladaptive behavior that has become far too common in our society. We have a hard time with hard conversations. Sometimes we don’t feel heard, and sometimes we don’t want to agree with others’ opinion no matter how logical. It is in this context that I ask you…
Are there times when we believe that no one else could possibly feel how we are feeling or understand what we are going through? Whether it is a sense of loss, disappointment, or frustration, we know that no one has ever felt this way. No matter how much our friends or strangers may try they couldn’t possible arrive at this point of understanding where we now stand. This is usually the case with negative emotions.
On the other hand are there times when we come upon a point of view and quickly get comfortable believing that because we have a particular view or experience therefore everyone else must feel/think the same way? Our clarity is so crystalthat any other possibility in thought is unfathomable. This is usually the case for specialized knowledge, opinions about social or political issues, or in instances where we want hang on to a behavior or value.
I looked around the interwebs and although I found a nice write up on logical fallacies, these two were not officially included. If there is no official designation then let’s call them “only me” and “everyone because me”, respectively. Both these views serve as a form of logical, perhaps emotional, fallacies.
Only me: While we may go through experiences in life that seem quite unique, with billions of people on the planet currently and those who have come before us it is not impossible to believe that someone has already been through the same feeling or experience. Sure, our own feeling seems unique on account of being ours (duh) but the fact is that a slightly broader view of the human condition shows that we are not the first ones to feel that feeling. It is actually this ability to imagine the shared collective consciousness of our species that makes it relatively doable for someone to express empathy for our state no matter how singular we are feeling in the moment.
Everyone, because me: Now the other end of the thread. Sometimes we arrive at some epiphany one day, and as soon as we embody that knowledge we start behaving as if it is perfectly logical to think that everyone else feels the same way or sees the same outcome, pretty much from the same moment as we do. Of course that is not always the case. We’ve all encountered people with specialist knowledge, e.g. computers, medicine, engineering, who walk through the world as if everyone knows, or should know, what they know. Meanwhile the rest of us are going…umm, well maybe I don’t have that view because I don’t have that know how. Closer to our own lives, and this is the most relevant to our current sociopolitical situation at large - we have two major groups of people in our country who have each taken a position on the Covid pandemic and related treatments, including vaccines. So when people make a claim, “well everyone knows/believes that…”, of course if you don’t share their opinion or vice versa, there is conflict about what “everybody knows”.
May I submit to you, dear reader, that both these fallacies have the same root: we have a deep need to feel connected to others. We actually want people to validate our feelings or for them to believe what we believe. Even saying ‘nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen’ is just a cry for help. As the world seems to be tearing apart at seams and people on social media or in real life proclaim, “you can never understand what I am going through” remember that may be they are just looking for someone to care and comfort them thru their negative feelings. And when in throes of an argument or a moment of excitement someone claims “well, everybody knows/does/believes that” remember that it is merely an unprovable wishful statement.
If we can practice creating some space for both these extremes, we may soon come to see the silly humor in them and also find ourselves to be easily caring humans for those afflicted, be it someone else or even us. We would also do well to remember that as the blue marble shown in the image above keeps spinning, there is very little that is so unique to us as one individual that it has no precedent or a follow up in the big picture. Live life to the fullest, make meaningful connections, but not take ourself too seriously, that seems to be the prescription of the moment.
Wishing us all a joyous, healthy, open-minded, and curious 2022!
P.S. I was hoping to have one more post before the year ended but I have been traveling and with about two hours to go this is going to be it. So I want to end this on a positive note. Indulge me if you have heard this story already.
A couple of years ago, two atoms were returning from Times Square New Year’s Eve party when one of them fell down. As the fallen atom got up and dusted off his friend said, “are you ok?” So the recovering atom said, “yeah but I think I lost an electron.” As he was looking around on the sidewalk the second atom asked, “are you sure?” The recovering atom said, “yes, yes. I am positive.”