Connections

I get really excited about learning new things and exploring how they cross-pollenate with all my other thought treasures in interesting and moving ways. I feel sure everyone else would want to know these thoughts as well, and in my exuberance, can deluge others with a flood of information that washes over them and right on out to sea. So, I bolster my enthusiasm and turn to honing these thoughts into the ‘right’ format so others will want to take them in and be helped. I dream of being able to fix problems people are experiencing, for which I feel I have meaningful solutions that will work. I feel compelled to rescue those bobbing along all awash at sea and bring them onto safe ground, I fail to notice that the sea they’re bobbing on is actually my helping, fixing, rescuing words and deeds I was so sure they would love and value. And I feel alone and ineffective. I was just trying to share my love.

Here’s what I learned that feels universal:

The more we try to visit information, solutions, and help upon people the more we can so easily experience a state of separateness, or loneliness and isolation. These feelings can intensify as we struggle to make our efforts more effective, increasing our sense of disconnection while we pull from our self-reliance bags even more self-determination and self– sufficiency. In our self-focus we can end up very alone. We can suffer from feelings that we don’t belong, when bringing people together to rejoice is what we have wanted most of all and have been working so hard to produce. But belonging and effective sharing require connection.

Follow me as I share three learning conditions that have whispered truths I needed to understand.

I have always been taught that solutions to the afore-mentioned problem are found in helping. Now, you might never struggle with this, but I have. I have heard the old axiom and have said to myself, “I need to find someone to help!” Here’s the problem with this idea. When we are helping someone, it is very hard not to see that person as weaker than ourselves. We become aware of our strength because we are using it. Others become aware of our strength also and can easily feel diminished by it. The conclusion: Helping doesn’t help so much.

Another way I have approached this conundrum is by embracing my desire to see a problem and fix it. Abraham Maslow said, “If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Here’s where this idea can get us into trouble. Seeing ourselves as fixers may cause us to see brokenness everywhere else, which obscures our own brokenness. This causes us to sit in unconscious judgment of another’s perceived defectiveness. We may miss the hidden wholeness in others and distrust the integrity of the life in them, trusting in our own expertise to fix them instead. Fixing doesn’t fix so much.

I’m not proud to own that I have, in my self-intensive frenzies, launched out to rescue someone who looked to me to be floundering, and rescuing implies an incapability in the rescuee. So, I rally all my fixing help and often end up dragging someone right out of exactly what they needed to heal their own journey. In my sincere eagerness, I blundered the opportunity to see their brilliance and insight that could have lifted me in my own life. I neglected their vulnerability and humility, which could have changed me as I struggled to heal as well. I completely missed the view of how our separate roads all led to the same moments of light and grace, just at different times and juxtapositions. I have to admit: Rescuing doesn’t really rescue so much.

Here’s the thing: Helping and fixing and rescuing are exhausting and they leave us just as isolated, disconnected, and ineffective as we were before we started! Perhaps there is something entirely different that is a wise answer to our struggles.

Consider this view: Connection is a relationship between equals. We don’t connect with just our strength, but with our whole selves.  We bring all our bits to the collective table and generously share what is there. We bring our wounds with our strengths, questions with our answers, embarrassments with our achievements, and shame with our understanding. We connect with our wholeness, and in return we are served by the wholeness in others. This often takes an act of courage. In connection there is no debt, only healing that is mutual. In connection we see the wholeness in others through our wholeness, and we collaborate with it and strengthen it. True connection renews life energies that have been drained away by helping and fixing and rescuing. Connection is a healer.

As we reflect more on the idea of connection, I believe we’ll find the refuge we all seek and contains both the strengths and the vulnerabilities within ourselves and others. In this sacred refuge, we can truly share and receive the wisdom that we and others have to offer.

I invite us to experiment with putting aside our need to help, fix, or rescue. I suspect that as we do so, we will find an ability to connect with each other through those parts of ourselves we would have to disown in a helping or fixing or rescuing frame of mind. We will begin to trust the wholeness in each other and in ourselves. We will find that life is not broken but holy.