This last Friday night I had a few friends over for a potluck dinner. And in a moment of giving thanks for this full house of people, the food, and just the peace and fullness that was my life in that moment, I had a little epiphany. As I scanned the people sitting around me, I saw a table full of people like me. I was aware of their strengths, their limitations, their personalities, and all the ways we fit together easily and not so easily. Not with judgment, nor needing anyone to be different from how they are, but just seeing them as is. I felt glad, peaceful, and thankful for these friends.
A thought pattern I get into sometimes is wanting to be perfect. Or at least “best.” It’s not enough to be good at my own hobbies, I want to be extremely good at all the hobbies. I want to be really good at Spanish, and pickleball, and music, and lifting weights, and hiking, and gardening, and making money, and biking, and cooking, and hosting dinners. I never want to be left out nor ignored for lack of skill. It’s like I’m trying to carve out my own uniqueness but in kind of a bastardized way. A competitive way. For each one of those activities, I want to be the best (or at least among the best 2 or 3), and I want to shun and dismiss all activities I can’t rank highly at. Which is really, really stupid.
Because, first off, what I actually want is to be in the universal flow of love. That is, to have friends. I want to love others fully and unconditionally, and to receive love fully and unconditionally. And all this notion of earning a higher place in the group is nothing but an obstacle to that. Love isn’t earned. That’s the whole freaking point. Love is an acceptance of someone as they are, not who you want them to be, nor what they can do for you, nor how talented they are. Love is an unlimited resource. No one is in competition for it because the actual supply is infinite. It’s our own faulty perceptions that make it scarce. Trying to be better than other people is an example of that. Not only is it a mistaken notion of love, it’s working against what I really want.
What do I get from being best at something, whether that’s having more money, more skill, winning a game, knowing more, being funnier, whatever? I feel a bit of pride in myself, a rush of victory. I feel like I’ve become somebody, like I really matter. And I get attention. Maybe not even particularly positive attention. If I win at pickleball, do I get love? No. I get a sometimes-grudging “good game, I’ll get you next time.” If I make more money, do I get more love? Again, no. What I get in both cases is a short reprieve from fear. Fear of being defeated, or being inferior. Fear of insecurity. For a moment, I feel like I can handle my life all by myself.
I’m starting to think I might be really sick in the head.
But here’s where the revelation comes in. The greatest good in the world is love. That’s the thing we want to experience more than anything. In fact, there’s nothing else that really comes close. Fear is like the opposite of love. And so we think by trying to escape our fear that we must be headed in the direction of love. But actually, we’re just heading deeper into a worldview defined by fear. Hence the status games we all play. Because we are trying to insulate ourselves from what we are afraid of, and we feel that there is only so much insulation to go around. Status is scarce, we use that. Money is scarce, or at least finite, and we use that too.
But love isn’t scarce. It’s truly unlimited. It allows us to be finite and be okay with that. We can love one another just as we already are.
And so that’s the final point I want to make. In my desire for wholeness, independence, and completeness unto myself, I create obstacles to the flow of love. I forget that in and of myself I can never be perfect, nor even self-sufficient. I can never be all things, I can’t even be good at all things. There are some challenges and rough moments coming my way in life for which I am going to be ill-suited. Fear would tell me to prepare for these obstacles by building wealth, developing my talents, and getting more tools to deal with future problems. In fact, I think there’s even some extent to which my personal healing journey is in part to try to become a perfect being. As if there’s some point at which I’ll be totally free of negative emotion, bad experiences, overreactions, and limiting beliefs, and that achieving this state will insure me against any future suffering.
But I think the easier, gentler way is to let go of some of my radical independence. Sure, be responsible, embrace growth, financial responsibility, and self-improvement. I’m all for that stuff. I’m a financial advisor for crying out loud. But the harder truth to remember is that I’m not alone. I don’t have to do it all alone. I don’t have to earn love, or be good enough to belong in a group of my fellows. There are people who I can lean on when I’m having a hard time.
What feels really good, really loving, is the giving. That’s what brings all those other things to life. I’m not giving so that I can hoard money and goodwill that I can exchange for help later on, because that becomes joyless and transactional. You might as well not give at all at that point. Instead, simply learning to love and accept others as they are feels good all by itself. In letting go of the comparisons and judgments (ie, the status games, the competitiveness I referenced earlier), I realize that these people are lovable just the way that they are (and I do truly love them), and so am I.
When we are in connection, community with one another, we are whole. Our strengths become the strengths of the group. Our weaknesses are covered by the other members of the group. We do not have to be good at everything, we need only be ourselves, and put ourselves into the service of our fellow community members. We can develop our talents, personalities, and resources. Those are good things to do. But the highest use of those things is not simply to provide for our own selves, but to have more to give to the larger whole with which we are connected.