Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast Thirdspace

Because we are imaginative beings, we can imagine and call into being all kinds of better possibilities for ourselves and those around us. At the same time, our imaginations can have us pretend to ourselves about the reality of our lives and experience. It’s completely understandable that we do this - distracting ourselves with what Rainer Maria Rilke calls ‘empty freedoms’ is surely one way to try to avoid experiences and feelings we don’t want to have. But those distractions, those ‘empty freedoms’ do little to help us plant deep roots, or to learn how to fly when called for. So how might we turn with courage and whole hearts towards the reality of what is, as a way of opening ourselves to the possibility of acting to bring about a better future?

How do we make the safety in ourselves that makes it possible for others to feel safe with us? How do we make it safe for others so they can feel safe in themselves? How do we make it safe for us to disagree with one another as well as agree, to be uncomfortable together as well as comfortable, to hold together unity and difference? And how might committing to this make it more possible for us humans to live together in families, organisations, and the societies of which we are a part?

We make all kinds of separations inside ourselves and between ourselves and one another. “I’m like this, but not like that” we tell ourselves. But that division leaves us bereft of all kinds of possibility and freedom. Perhaps right when we’re feeling most serious, it’s time to reach for that in us which is playful and bring it right alongside. Or when we meet someone very different to us, it’s time to discover their many virtues and see what it is like to bring those virtues inside us, alongside the virtues we already claim as our own.

We bring ourselves into life in a dance we learned right from our earliest days… in which we’re often carefully managing what we can show to one another of ourselves. And others learn to dance with us in this way too, finding out from bring around us what to talk about, and what to avoid. Pretty soon we’re all dancing around that which, if we pay attention, was in plain view all along. Oftentimes the dance feels necessary. Sometimes it is necessary. But keeping on the surface of things is hardly a way towards the intimacy, connection, contact and realness we long for. So who could we be for ourselves and for one another, so that we can bring ourselves - and all our rich complexity - into the light for the benefit of everyone around us?

Change is everywhere. Within us. Around us. And, sometimes, in our longing for some stability, some centre of ‘no change’ in the tumult of our lives, we’ll close ourselves off from the truth of things, numbing ourselves, distracting ourselves, and pretending it isn’t happening. But the truth is that everything changes. And although we might try to fight it, we human beings long for what is true, what is real, and for intimacy with the world. So can we instead ‘make an altar to change’, and turn towards its ever-presence as a way of deepening our engagement with life, and with one another?

We often go searching out in the world, far and wide, for qualities that already live in ourselves. And, fuelled by the story of our wider culture that our longings are best met always by ‘more’ and always ‘away from ourselves’, we can forget the treasures that live right here within us, in this living, beating, life-filled heart and body that we are never separate from. So how can we open ourselves to meeting the deeper something that we long for, that we already are? And how can we help one another home?