Monday, September 12, 2022

Gentle Unpacking

How do you tolerate intolerance? One of the idea-tools I find useful from Yogic philosophy is Ishwara. It roughly translates as “God understood as a person” in contrast to an impersonal, impossible to reduce to words, transcendent “explanation”. Your Ishwara then becomes the closest you can possibly come to an explanation. Your Ishwara and mine can co-exist because they are imperfect and thus compatible. 

Unless of course you insist that mine can’t exist, and your way is the correct way, and I am not willing to accept the binary you are imposing. If me not saying you are wrong or I am wrong, is seen by you as saying you are wrong! I am not allowed to have a “believe what you want as long as it doesn’t impose on me” view. 

There are some impositions we can’t avoid. Some joint decisions we must make. Sometimes you have to come up with pragmatic hacks. “I am going to be as tolerant as possible, but I am going to have boundaries”. 

I like the idea of unconditional love, for example. But what can happen if you gift someone that love, is they come at you hard to test those boundaries. Holding space for someone still needs to include the paradoxic condition of them being loved but no longer involved. 

That is hard when you have a story you tell about yourself. Reality seldom permits completely consistent stories. Real life is a messy combination of learning and unlearning. Everything that happens challenges our story. We have to hold and release to create. We look for answers, while needing to make peace with constantly improving our questions. 

Gently unpacking issues that may never reach resolution.



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