Stretch out in the park and feel the breeze filling your lungs. Traces of you whisk downwind. The oxygen exhaled by nearby plants blows into your body, microbial life visiting with each inhalation. Tiny motes of yourself, sloughed off skin cells, pheromones, take flight into the world - little adventurous messengers. Isn't that fun?
I like the sense of profound connection, feeling my oneness with plants, birds, soil and sky. But oneness is oneness. It includes cough germs, the dog poo, and the carcass of a shopping trolley exposed on the riverbank. That is less nice, and I resist it. But what I resist most is accepting my oneness with other people.
Not, particularly, my family or friends. The really hard challenge is people whose actions or opinions I find intolerable. I'm not going to give examples of such actions and opinions: the things that I find intolerable may be different from those you find intolerable. The issue is not the specifics of what we each find intolerable, it's that we respond by dividing the great oneness of the world, denying our connection with the intolerable. But the intolerable is still there.
I think this dividing up of the world is at the root of how conflict of opinion spills over into violence and war. Once the intolerable is experienced as entirely separate from ourselves, then eliminating it becomes a potentially tempting option. We might start with persuasion, or coercion, but violence and annihilation have become options too.
So as a tiny contribution to making my part of the world more peaceful and more war-resistant, I seek to extend my oneness and acknowledge uncomfortable connection. My exercise is to first feel my continuity with the world and how other people are also part of that great continuity. Then I choose some person or behaviour from which I would like to disconnect and I try to reconnect them as part of my extended mind-body: the world.
That's it. If you try it, please let me know what you experienced below. I don't think we need to love everyone, or even forgive them, and I don't think we need to somehow permit all behaviours. But just to remember that although we play particular parts, we aren't directing the whole universe.
You can oppose both people and beliefs without casting them out of your world. We are all just infinitesimal microdots interconnected with a billion billion other parts of this enormous world. Remember how small everyone is, and release the assumption that either you or anyone else can possibly know the whole of what, if anything, is truly 'right' on the scale of the universe.
I think it makes a difference. Not always, and not immediately. But it can allow flexibility back into a stalemate, grow new paths from dead ends, offer breathing space when the pressure's building. It's not as much fun as visualising sunlight and oxygen exchanges, but it might help protect the park if, someday in the future, something we disagree on threatens to erupt into open conflict.
