Interaction

Editor’s Note: Readers of Dark Matter may recall my friend and neighbor, Lynne McFarland. I shared some of her writing a while back (“Let’s Break Free”). Here’s a sampling still achingly relevant: “So here we are in Tennessee. Getting ready to set ourselves on fire, denying our wholeness, in the process of self-destruction, and hollering ‘yee-haw’ as we go down.” I love her voice. This is another instance of Lynne sharing a photo and a text on Facebook and me asking and receiving her permission to post it here. I urge you to meditate on the above image a little and then return to it after reading to the end. “Small meetings, tiny energy exchanges, and new syntheses.”

I had a little moment of being pulled up short today by a friend. Earlier in the day I had been told about a policy in an organization with which I volunteer. The policy was not new, but it was new to me, and my initial reaction to hearing about it was, “I didn’t like it.” My friend’s response to my telling her about this was immediate. She said, “But you wouldn’t want….” and broadened the picture to include all the people who stood to be harmed if the policy did not exist. This was the opposite of my reaction to the policy, in which I had seen that some people might be deprived by the policy. Then the kicker. My friend pointed out that we could assure that everyone had what they needed. She was coming from the perspective of “there is plenty for all,” and I had been coming from the perspective of scarcity, of course.

I was startled by how quickly this little exchange turned me around. It rattled around in my head the rest of the evening—my sudden awareness that I could draw all sorts of conclusions from one context (scarcity) and not even realize that’s where I was coming from. Till I happened to have an interaction that uncovered it. I think this occurs in my life fairly often, having a “take” on something for inner reasons that are at least somewhat hidden to me at the moment. Needing another perspective to shake the jar, provide context, reveal the broader picture.

My friend is way more open than I am. That’s just her personality and that’s just my personality, hers to have a bright belief in the possibilities of situations and mine to carefully stick in a wary toe. This is one big reason we all need each other, don’t you think, for small meetings, tiny energy exchanges, and new syntheses arising in moments of unguarded conversations?