In Between, Episode 199
We're mostly told that our job is to be in control of life - that's the whole narrative of 'self-improvement' and 'progress' and 'optimisation' that permeates much of contemporary culture. But it's an interpretation of life that barely meets life's real conditions - that we're always in the middle of things, and that many things keep on falling apart and coming together quite without our say-so.
So can we find a different story to live in, one that allows us to receive our lives rather than stand outside them, and one that supports us in both welcoming and participating, in both giving and receiving, in being with what comes as well as bringing ourselves to what comes?
This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about the possibility that what we're doing by being in life is more like 'dancing' or 'playing' than it is like 'engineering' hosted as always by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
Here's our source for this week:
In Between
Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realise it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don’t get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It’s a very tender, nonaggressive, open-ended state of affairs.
Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.
From ‘Things Fall Apart’ by Pema Chödrön