Interwoven Peaces
An essay by Johanna Murphy and Lisa Koshkarian
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people…
to fulfill the promise of being one people, necessary to abolish any government that becomes destructive of these ends, necessary to dissolve the political bans that keep us from speaking to each other, necessary to avow our interdependence, to look straight into each other’s eyes the way we behold the moon, and declare to one another: I see you. I see you. I see you.
-From Declaration of Inter-dependence, Richard Blanco
And she said, “ losing love is like a window in your heart
Everbody sees you’re blown apart
Everybody sees the wind blow”
-From Graceland, Paul Simon
Wanting out but going in. Going out but wanting in. Insides and outsides. The roadmaps for our anxieties are unconsciously laid by a society which insists on binary destinations. The ego is gratified and relieved to be assured by these mores that it does not have to live in the dreaded gray area of otherness and uncertainty. So, even though these dilemmas of engaging insides or outsides may be more fruitfully navigated by holding wonder and awe at the unknown, decisions are foreclosed. We cater to our worst fears, or familiar stasis, without questioning.
How can we stay open? What allows us to resist this urge to foreclose? We have learned to navigate some of this complicated terrain through many experiences with loss. We feel that the emotion/pain will be too difficult to handle. We endeavor to forestall the raging storm in our hearts. In grief, the very object we want to soothe us is inaccessible and often this feels unbearable. Where do we put this love we have for the other when they no longer exist in discernable forms? Do we push it out when actually enveloping its aesthetic beauty (a la Meltzer, both graspable and elusive at once) may be just the harvesting that is needed? Or do we inhibit new experiences in the world for fear of giving it new life, a different life, one that we may sooner or later not recognize?
We have taken up these questions in writing this essay together, allowing a dialectic and in turn keeping each other’s grief company. We are getting outside of ourselves and letting the other inside of us by interweaving our ideas. At times, we have wondered is this my thought or yours and put this aside for the better question of whether the insight is well conveyed. Or, urgently needed. This collaboration has touched ideas we have metabolized in practicing psychotherapy but more importantly, highlighted how our lived experiences and choices uniquely affect us. We know each other’s stories but through attempting to be heard in these most intimate exchange of sentences, we are revealing our hearts. Grief can feel like being out at sea when a big set of waves comes rolling in. We go under one…two…three waves; it can feel relentless. If more of these swells are coming at this pace, how will we keep going? What has helped both of us more than anything in these circumstances is to deepen the breath, travel inside and find the determination to carry forward. I remember that I have had this same feeling before and thought I would not be able to keep going and yet here I am. I keep going. So many of us are doing so much better, relatively speaking, or have untapped capacities, than we give ourselves credit for. There is an inner terrain that I can access in the midst of being out at sea, recalling the vista of the mid- morning sunlight glimmering on the ocean after the fog has burned off. The sea is inviting, clear and calm. There is this inner brilliance in us, a place of resilience. It’s hard to access when we are in the midst of the struggle. When I recall this inner terrain I allow alignment and agency to lead me to peace.
We hear about a friend who recently went camping and we offer, “I should go outdoors more often.” Time passes, hiking boots aren’t purchased, trails aren’t explored, stasis returns. What are we afraid of? Change? Fresh air? Feeling novice? Being alone? Or, experiencing the intimacy with ourselves or another which is unique to being in wide open spaces? Conversely, we keep thinking about finally trying meditation. Everyone says it’s life-changing. But we tell ourselves that we just don’t have time, our schedules are too booked, and we don’t know how to meditate the right way anyway. Our inner worlds are messy, ambiguous, scary. Perfectionistic aims are ordered, magical. So, we continue to take the roads most traveled.
If we can get outside, can we notice this beauty all around us? The way the bird chirps at us from the branch? The way the sun shines through the green leaves of the tree and behind that the blue sky creates a backdrop for it all? Lately, when walking at night and the moon is shining down with its silvery glow, it feels like a nature show just for me. It takes noticing these things and then spending a few more minutes breathing them in to shift our mood. If we take a little more time to pause and reflect on the ineffable mysteries, this may create new capacities to hold what is terrifying as well as what is liberatory. Maybe through this process we might feel deeply uplifted. We can come back to these moments of grappling with our psychic untidiness and access our truths more readily if we anchor in acceptance. We have so many routines around getting the oil changed, picking up cat food, reading that article. How about exploring the neuroscience of joy in our brains? Not psychoanalytic enough? Being in the binary of theoretical purity can be foreclosing, exclusive. We work so hard at mourning, why not put the same effort into the micro-experiencing of pleasure, including the delight of accepting our tangled selves as we are?
As with mourning, joy, and love, compassion is a vital universalizing sensation. We like how Martha Nussbaum upholds compassion as pivotal to a just society which looks and lives both outward and inward in good measure. She describes this paramount ontological state of being as a painful emotion occasioned by the misfortune of another person (Nussbaum, 2016). The right measure would include working through one’s shame, which she likens to a narcissistically organized preoccupation with perfection, eclipsing the ability to see outside of oneself. She (and Freud) see guilt as more advanced on the developmental curve, and as being built on acknowledgment of the rights of others. Guilt implies a sense of culpability for surrounding impacts. Attention to insides and outsides can create an inner equilibrium. Compassion and responsibility offer a moral compass in which one may feel concern for people they don’t know, which in our minds links to Jean Laplanche’s, “das and der Andere” (Laplanche, 1997). Das Andere, the otherness of our unconscious, lies in wait to make contact with the same in others, der Andere. This represents a crucial, proliferative union which lamentably often remains dormant and invisible, for many lifetimes over. It is no coincidence that this “other thing in us” is socio-culturally non-normative. This iconoclastic force is what we otherwise would be seduced by if it weren’t prohibited by our frightened psyches and an outside world which prefers to keep our options as limited as a dichotomous questionnaire.
Our chronic sense of internal unrest takes up an inordinate amount of psychic energy, such that the capacity to wholly acknowledge, let alone feel compassion toward the other-the stranger, the foliage, the wind, one’s partner- has become swallowed up. How can we shift away from this narrative of what’s wrong to what feeds us? Can we instead look up or out and disengage from the lure to look down at what is flawed or frightening? Another force keeping us inside of ourselves is having been taught by an individualistic, capitalist society that the way to succeed is to rely on yourself. Getting it done all on our own earns us a false veneer of accomplishment. Intuitively, we know there is another way. We see that when we join forces, something more layered and textured comes alive. There are inordinate possibilities all of a sudden. We don’t have to carry our heart’s burdens and the jubilation by ourselves. We can create something so much bigger and richer, together.
Your ideas bounce off mine and mine yours. We are apprehending the gift of believing in collaboration as the way forward. We remember these times of being in family or community and of our cravings being nourished. We know this is the antidote to loss. The way we have had to fortify ourselves to get through the storm or the big set of waves was done in part through remembering who is on the shore waiting for us. We are buoyed by those loved ones and even the ones who are no longer with us. Formative or joyful adventures of the past stay with us, strengthen us, hold and bolster new experiences. We are a little wiser and more accepting because of them. We are reassured by knowing that being human is something we all share in common, no matter whether others have ever been “known” to us.
Everyone is inside of everyone else, and this might bring us comfort and peace on nature walks, swims, gazing at vistas, and internal reflections. We can remember that the ones we loved, and the ones we have never met, also loved the moon shining through the clouds at night. Seeing this now reminds us of them and this kinship. We can grow a compassion for ourselves and in doing this, a deeper compassion for others. We can hear the same song in our minds and know that the meaning might be slightly different for each of us but at the same time, it is touching us both and that is enough to feel interconnected. Here, we have taken the greatest risk, coming outside of ourselves to expose our vulnerabilities, allowing the other to see us, edit or erase our precious words, as we pass them back and forth to one another. Thank goodness for this process, the tapestry we have woven has created capaciousness that we separately couldn’t have imagined.
Works Cited
Laplanche, J. (1997). The theory of seduction and the problem of the other. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 78: 653-666.
Nussbaum, M. (2016). Anger and forgiveness: Resentment, generosity and justice. New York: Oxford University Press.
