I often entertain the illusion that I’m independent. This is not politically but personally. However, in my heart of hearts, I know that I must transcend this immature quality because I believe we need each other. Although I depend on countless people every day, acknowledging that I need others doesn’t come easy to me. Maybe right now more than ever I don’t want to need others, now when so many of us are focused on democracy, which feels like the biggest, most maddening, most heart-wrenching group project ever. So, it’s become a daily practice to acknowledge my humble interdependence.
Interdependence as a Spiritual Practice
One way I’m inviting awareness of interdependence is by making mealtime a spiritual practice. We are privileged to eat dinner together as a family nearly every night, but I often eat breakfast and lunch on my own. Instead of zoning out and reading or listening to something while I eat, I have started trying to eat mindfully. I think about all it took to get my delicious food to me. I think about the maddening Eric Carle book, Pancakes! Pancakes! that I ended up donating when the kids were little because it felt too tedious to consider let alone read aloud all the steps it takes to make a desire for a pancake turn into a pancake on the breakfast plate. I think about why I don’t want to think about what it takes to get me what I want: typical human impatience and impatience born of living in a two-day-delivery-impatient time. I think a lot about farmworkers and how they will be some of the first to go (to what end?!) if the election doesn’t go the way I want it to. I think, “I need you.” This is needing others on a transactional level but there is holiness here: lifting up the abilities and work ethic of farmworkers and grocery store employees and truck drivers and acknowledging that I cannot do what they do. I think: you make my life possible on a cellular level.
In the book 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, author Oliver Burkeman describes “Super” Mario Salcedo, a Cuban American man who has spent most of the last 20 years on Royal Caribbean cruises. Salcedo frequently proclaims that he’s got every reason to be the happiest guy in the world – no more chores or low-value activities to consume his leisure and enjoyment time. Yet there seem to be cracks in the facade, like his lack of a consistent community aside from Royal Caribbean employees. Burkeman points out that time is a “‘network good,’ one that derives its value from how many other people have access to it too, and how well their portion is coordinated with yours.” Although Salcedo got to basically transcend society (and in that way he is a good stand-in for the very wealthy) he isn’t able to “just be happy” because we need each other.
I’ve been thinking about how much I need teachers lately, because our public school system feels fragile and under attack, and although I think it might last through the final seven years of my kids’ growing up, I’m not sure about that and I really don’t know if it will be around if my kids have kids. Every day, I participate in the intergenerational and interdependent system of public education. This is where my kids spend their days 10 months a year and as I drop them off, I think to all the people who are making it happen inside the school walls, “I need you.” I lift up their abilities and work ethic and acknowledge that I cannot do what they do. They make our family’s life possible and they are partners in raising our children.
Not for Ourselves Alone
My faith, Unitarian Universalism, is guided by seven principles, and our seventh principle is “Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” At church, Reverend Wendy often reminds us that we are not and we never have been for ourselves alone. Church is hopefully a place where our individualized spirituality gets tested in community, where it hopefully gets stretched and deepened and strengthened by accountability, ritual, and a better awareness of all who came before us and all who will come after.
Film director Andrei Tarkovsky said that “Modern art has taken a wrong turn in abandoning the search for the meaning of existence in order to affirm the value of the individual for his own sake.” He further explains, “in an artistic creation the personality does not assert itself, it serves another, higher, and communal idea. The artist is always the servant, and is perpetually trying to pay for the gift that has been given to him as if by a miracle.” What this means to me is that surrendering to interdependence does not diminish or humiliate us but allow us to be bigger, to be as capacious and alive and real as we were meant to be.
How are you on this Halloween, during this presidential election season? I’d love to hear from you about interdependence or, honestly, anything at all. I am sending love during this precarious time.
