A World of Divide

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I have, not so much a memory, but a series of sensory images from when I was very young, maybe two years old, of riding on my Dad’s back. I am in one of those 80’s blue canvas and steel backpacks, looking out over his right shoulder at a large body of water. It was frigid, and I was bundled up and snug. 

It was peaceful. 

It was home. 

Growing up, some of my favorite moments were when my parents would reminisce about all the times my dad would put me on his back and go fishing. At this point in my life, these cherished acts have taken on an aura of sacredness, and despite remembering little to nothing, they are times that I know I was truly bonded to my Dad. I was utterly safe and trust was absolute. 

That’s how we all hope we start out right? With that type of bond. I was lucky. 

Our bondedness. 

This absolute closeness we shared. 

What a gift. 

Before the world got in the way.

Before we got in our own ways. 

__________

I have been thinking a lot about my Dad lately. 

Our relationship. 

Where it started. Where it is now. 

And a singular question keeps running through my mind:

How do we cross a world of divide? 

I love my Dad, of that there is no doubt. But there is also no doubt that our relationship is distant. Pleasant, to be sure, but quiet – quiet with the silence of all we do not say. The spaces in between our words full of what our hearts want to express, but have learned from regretful experience not to. 

You could say that we know each other, but don’t know each other. Our ideas of who we think the other is are bound up in the labels and trademarks of our outermost selves. 

Superficially we are the antithesis of each other:

She/Her. He/Him.

Daughter, Wife, Mother. Son, Husband, Father. 

Drawn to literature. Drawn to mathematics. 

Liberal. Conversative. 

And in many not so superficial ways we are the same:

Driven.

Passionate. 

Loyal.

Rooted in conviction. 

I mean, we slurp coffee and soup the same exact way. We blow our noses every time we eat and both have voracious appetites. We adore the outdoors and abhor littering. We move through the world heavy-footed, no matter how “stealth” we try to be. We have an affinity for flossing.

My point is that there is no doubt this human makes up fifty percent of who I am, and yet there are times when I wonder how the ways in which we see the world could differ so vastly. How could we end up on such seemingly opposite poles? 

Because we are, in more ways than one, apart. 

A world apart. 

How did we get here? 

Over space and time, slowly retreating from one another step by step, we have figured out how to live this way. 

A poem by Jane Hirshfield exquisitely captures these sentiments: 

Cataclysm

It begins subtly:
the maple
withdraws an inch from the birch tree.

The porcupine
wants nothing to do with the skink.

Fish unschool, 
sheep unflock to separately graze. 

Clouds meanwhile
declare to the sky
they have nothing to do with the sky,
which is not visible as they are,

nor knows the trick of turning
into infant, tumbling pterodactyls.

The turtles and moonlight?
Their long arrangement is over. 

As for the humans. 
Let us not speak of the humans. 
Let us speak of their language. 

The first person singular 
condemns the second person plural
for betrayals neither has words left to name. 

The fed consider the hungry
and stay silent. 

From Ledger

As Hirshfield first articulates, “It begins subtly.” It did. And yet, because of the way we humans perceive and experience time, it also seems like I went from riding on my dad’s back, feeling safe and warm, to staring into the void, unable to see him, in a veritable blink of an eye.

And the way she speaks of the condemning of one another “for betrayals neither had words left to name.” Indeed we went from talking with curiosity when I was young, to at times yelling as I progressed into my teenage and young adult years, to growing quiet as I matured into adulthood, and then ultimately choosing not to speak on most things at all – our words failing us and us failing them, time and time again.

How did we get here? 

And yet, when I think about it, it really isn’t that hard to understand. 

We ended up here in the name of peace. 

Yes. 

Peace. 

We ended up where we are because we believed that the only way to keep the peace was to be silent. Because somewhere down the line our relationship shifted and the common ground that we shared began to erode. 

In many ways we saw it happening and in many ways it caught us by surprise. Regardless, we chose to rarely speak of it. Better to to practice reticence than invite in a whole host of unsavory alternatives. Right? I mean what’s the point? It’s not like we are going to change each other’s minds. Let’s just enjoy one another’s company in the ways that we can and ignore everything else. We can always debrief and unload with our spouses or friends later, or just bottle it up and push it down. 

Let’s be real. This is effective. Entire relationships are built upon foundations such as these, and in many ways, and at many times, it’s necessary and is sometimes the only safe route to go. 

But what if you are fortunate like me and it wasn’t a matter of safety but a matter of convenience – a matter of comfort – a matter of, at times, cowardice? Is that it? Is this our fate? We are doomed to triviality because we can’t be bothered to write a new story – to forge a new path? 

We have become so saturated by the ways we’ve been conditioned to live and have been living them for so long, that we have lost the ability to imagine an alternate reality for ourselves. 

Ultimately becoming stuck.

Through the loss of our creativity and curiosity, we have ended up the captives of our own convictions, convinced that our way is the right way and that there is no other, so help us. 

But when we look back over a life of that, what will we have to show for it? 

A bunch of pleasantries and tepid encounters.

If we are lucky… 

But what if that’s not good enough? And worse, what if it’s actually holding us back? What if it’s actually hurting us? 

There are times when I find myself incensed by my Dad’s beliefs, and he by mine. We test the waters at times by making half hearted jokes, skirting around the shore of our truths, dipping in a toe here and there, but let’s be real, we are only barely skimming the surface. Our fear of shattering the precarious peace we have built holds us back, causes us to be timid, lest we push things too far. Our relationship is one built on love and a bond forged in a backpack thirty five years ago, yet we can’t seem to find our way back to one another.

All of this makes me curious and anxious about what happens when we are engaging with humans that we don’t feel as loyal to or connected with. What happens then I wonder? 

I think we are seeing and living the ramifications of this right now – all around us. 

__________

How do we cross a world of divide?

Two years ago I would have despaired at this question, and in many ways I still do. But I actually think I am starting to figure it out, parts of it at least. 

I think we start healing our relationships with others, by first healing the relationship with ourselves. 

As the rabbi Yehuda Berg coined, “hurt people hurt people.” 

No matter who we are, where we come from, or how we have lived, we all have hurts and traumas that reside within us. Even if we are wildly fortunate. Even if we have lived incredibly privileged lives. None of us rides for free – no one – no matter what. And these hurts? Oftentimes, but definitely not always, they manifest themselves outwardly, causing us to lash out at those around us for the very things we can’t stand or reconcile within ourselves.  

Then – hopefully, miraculously – we do the internal work and we start to realize some things:

• It’s simultaneously not about you at all and all about you. 
• Humans, we are all doing the best we can. 
• You are responsible for your own trash and no one else’s. 
• Control is an illusion.

I have spent the last two years intensively figuring some of my shit out, and what’s flourished as a result, is growth rooted in more compassion and grace for both myself and others than I ever thought possible. 

You do the inside work and then and only then are you perhaps ready to do the outside work.

And when you’re ready to do the outside work, you realize that what you thought was the work is actually not the work at all. That you’ve had it all wrong. 

In my case, with my Dad, I have spent so much of my life calling him out and attempting to change his beliefs – mostly inside of my own head – and it has gotten us nowhere. After healing myself a bit, I now know that I don’t want to call him out, I want to, as activist Loretta J Ross speaks of, call him in. Calling in, according to Ross, is a call-out done with love. She goes on in an opinion piece for The New York Times called I’m a Black Feminist. I Think Call-Out Culture Is Toxic., “Calling-in engages in debates with words and actions of healing and restoration, and without the self-indulgence of drama.”

Without the self-indulgence of drama…  

Damn, for sure. 

What would it be like to have a conversation rooted in curiosity and compassion, one in which the fire in my belly doesn’t end up in a roiling boil, one without drama on my end? I honestly don’t know at this point. But I really, really want to find out. 

Now you may be thinking that there are things worth getting worked up for and angry about, and you would be absolutely correct. However, I would offer that anger, as Brené Brown sagely speaks of in her new book Atlas of the Heart, is a wonderful catalyst, but a crappy companion. She states:

“Anger is a catalyst. Holding onto it will make us exhausted and sick. Internalizing anger will take away our joy and spirit; externalizing anger will make us less effective in our attempts to create change or forge connection. It’s an emotion that we need to transform into something life-giving: courage, love, change, compassion, justice.”

I know what it feels like to stew in anger, I did it for a long time in my twenties and early thirties. It festers and rots us from the inside out, and no one is better for it – clearly. And while my anger has tempered over time, I have unwittingly settled comfortably – arrogantly – into another suspect emotion/state of being, that of self-righteousness. Brené speaks of this too in Atlas:

“According to researchers, “Self-righteousness is the conviction that one’s beliefs and behaviors are the most correct.” People who exhibit self-righteousness see things as black and white – they tend to be close-minded, intolerant of ambiguity, and less likely to consider others’ opinions.” 

Guilty, on all counts. 

So back to the work. When you start to heal yourself – walk into and confront your shadows – break yourself open – you become better at calling yourself in and cleaning up your own trash. You recognize that what you always felt was the responsibility of others is really your own, and you begin to see the world and the people in it with a nuanced eye. 

Nuance. 

It’s my new favorite word.

Google defines nuance as: a subtle difference in or shade of meaning, expression, or sound. 

Writer Rebecca Solnit adds a human touch in her book of essays Men Explain Things to Me, “We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don’t… the language of bold assertion is simpler, less taxing, than the language of nuance and ambiguity and speculation.”

What I’m starting to see, and truly understand, is that everything, literally everything, has nuance to it. And we are, all of us, guilty of ignoring it. 

As humans, we love to boil things down to absolutes because as Solnit states, it makes things simpler. To see a situation is all negative or all positive, or a person is all bad or all good let’s us off the hook when it comes to critical thought. It’s so much easier to write a person off than it is to get close to them, especially those with which we have conflicting attitudes and beliefs.

In fact, nuance is so important that we even need nuance when it comes to nuance – for nuance routinely manifests itself as toxic positivity and is used to excuse abhorrent behavior far too often. There’s much to say on this topic, but I’ll leave it here for now, lest I digress too far…

I am guilty of ignoring nuance and writing off my dad as someone who is irrational and unmovable, and this is a person that I love, deeply. Again, I can’t help but wonder how this bodes for the humans we do not care for as much? How might these feelings become magnified against those we have seemingly no bond with? What does this do to our empathy for others? 

Look, I don’t think we were meant to be friends with, or even like everybody – or even most people. There will always be those that we just don’t jive with and those we were never meant to call friends. That’s not what I’m talking about. What I am saying however, that no matter how we feel about it all we are in it, on this planet, living this life together – all of us – for better or worse, and in the name of deep, meaningful, and authentic community, we need to learn how to find our way back to ourselves and each other.

Our survival depends on it. 

So, how do we cross a world of divide? 

Like I already admitted, I really don’t know. But I am making it my mission to find out. 

__________

I miss my dad. I miss the bond we shared; a bond that I know is still there, if only we have courage enough – if only I have courage enough – to give it the oxygen it needs to bring it back to life. 

I’ll keep you posted on how it goes. 

In the meantime, I’ll be here, facing the dark, feeling my way forward step by step, brave moment by brave moment, trembling and trusting…

Bird by bird. 

Because it’s worth it. 

He’s worth it. 

I’m worth it.

We are all worth it. 

Do you hear me Dad? We may not be able to see each other yet, but don’t worry, keep your eyes open,

I am on my way. 

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Let’s keep doing hard things and moving through the world with a strong back, soft front, and wild heart.

If you’re interested in any of this, in my journey, my story, keep reading. Much more meandering musings and kuhlhuman thoughts to come.

Also! If you have questions about what I write or even suggestions for future blog posts, feel free to leave a comment below or email me at thekuhlhuman@gmail.com.