No surprise that interdependence can feel like sweet balm in an otherwise-imbalanced world. But what we seem to forget is that interdependence isn’t something we have to try for, orchestrate or strive for. It’s something we simply can’t fall out of.
In other words, you do not have to try to be interdependent. You simply can’t not be.
Meditation is ultimately about dropping as much of the framework or understanding as we can, and beholding directly the mystery of existence. The more we shed our ideas about what the world is, the more intimately we can encounter it.
Why do I feel so desperately lonely?
Because “I am” is now invisible: it is ungraspable, uncertain, unstable, perpetually withheld from my reach. “I am” is always becoming and persists at the end of time. “I am” is inexhaustible movement, relationship, fluxing transition between states. But “I am” is breathing me when “I think” I am breathing it. It is an affirmation of my existence. It is Change. Always changing (thank God, always changing).
There’s a lot to hide from these days. The sense of hopelessness in witnessing climate catastrophe, helplessness in the face of war, injustice, and the erosion of multiple rights and freedoms can be overwhelming. The urge to turtle into the comfort of our own safe harbours of distraction or like-minded ideological bubbles is completely understandable.
But to address these giant crises and their systemic roots, we’re going to have to come out of our hidey holes eventually. Truth is we need each other, and not just those in our comfortable circles. Our existence as a species, our survival and safety, is absolutely tied to one another. We live in relationship, to everyone and everything.
Freedom, as they say, is an inside job. Turns out, we don’t need to free ourselves from everything if we can expand the field so wide that nothing’s left out. The inside job is less spa day, more hanging out with the full cast of your inner sitcom without needing anyone to shut up.
And yet, it’s not only an inside job. My ability to even consider “inner freedom” has always been propped up by outer freedoms that rely on—surprise!—other people. A room of my own. Patient, brilliant teachers. Cats that sit in my lap when I meditate so I don’t dare get up.