Comfort With What Is

This theme of perspective continues to escalate. Not just in personal ways, but within the collective.

This morning about 6 o’clock I was awakened by a “poke” on my left shoulder. It was a somatic poke. A physical sensation. The kind of experience where you would swear an actual person was there doing the poking.

John and I had a very awkward time yesterday. I was talking to him about disinformation and what makes people vulnerable to disinformation. His initial position was to say how the other side does that too. I’ve heard him say that many, many times and I just respond, “Two wrongs don’t make a right. It doesn’t matter if everyone’s doing it, if it’s not something that’s wholesome, we have the freewill choice to abandon the unwholesome and cultivate the wholesome.”

I was able to gain a beautiful insight after I finally asked him if anything I shared with him had invited him at all to a greater openness to question his own view. He told me no and I felt really deflated, somewhat hopeless with sadness. Then I realized his attachment to view and everyone’s attachment to view might be okay.

Earlier in the day, Sheilana’s words had spoken so clearly about how it is that people have view saying, “And the thing is that if you’re in that same position that I’m in, noticing the very same thing I’m noticing, we’re going to notice two different things. We won’t notice the same, not necessarily notice the same part of it.”

And here is the key, “It is a chore to remind myself that everything is perfect just like it is, that because I want it to be some way, doesn’t mean that it’s ever going to be that. Because everybody else wants it to be their way too, and that just doesn’t work. So how is it that we come into a space where we’re comfortable with what is? And we’ve talked about it many times in the past, about how we can help make a change by being in that space of comfort with what is, instead of wanting it to be different.”

Comfort with what is….

The truth of this came to be evident to me during the decades I worked with a lot of people who were navigating health challenges. Resisting the pain, fighting the necessity of giving recovering some time, not wanting it to be the way it is right now actually can prolong the process. For sure, it heightens the suffering.

This morning I was able to see yesterday’s process as progress.

Twelve years ago, in 2012, the gap in understanding between John and me was cavernous. That was just three presidential elections ago.

One of the guys on the Tuesday morning meditation was speaking about Attack from Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America, a book by Barbara McQuade, an American lawyer who served as the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan from 2010 to 2017. Disinformation is not just misinformation. Disinformation is designed to evoke a strong emotional response nurturing perspectives with more extreme views, making it difficult and sometimes impossible to find common ground with others.

Perhaps Sheilana is saying that the only common ground is comfort with what is.

Some years ago, Barbara Brodsky shared this image of two ladders. The ladders are the same height, but the distance between the steps was ginormous. The person had not yet gotten off the ground on the other ladder, but the person was already near the top of the ladder with the smaller steps.

Perhaps we have ease and success and comfort with with what is: smaller steps!