• On Holding Conflicting Values & Realities

  • Feb 28 2024
  • Length: 11 mins
  • Podcast

On Holding Conflicting Values & Realities

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  • Have you ever heard a self-help teacher or friend say the words—Don’t should yourself…? As if should were a nasty word? If so, what do you think about this phrase? For a long time, I’d hear people admonishing themselves for saying the word should, and it would rub me the wrong way, but I didn’t quite know why. Then I discovered that the English word should comes from the same root as the Dutch and German word schuld, which means both guilt and debt. According to YourDailyGerman.com: “(For) some two thousand years, Schuld was simply about a sort of obligation that you had toward someone. Like…bringing the smith a boar because he fixed your ax or giving the chieftain a barrel of ale because he won the last drinking competition.” As a white person with multiple proximities to systemic power living on stolen land, I believe that I have a schuld— a debt rooted in unearned privilege, an obligation to pay reparations and to work to dismantle imperialism and white supremacy, the systems that give rise to my privilege. I believe there are some things I really should do. And yet, many people also use the word should to judge themselves into complying with dominant culture’s expectations, and this sense of obligation to the status quo does not serve most of us well. The inherent tension in the word should points to the deeper tension that most of us who care deeply about social justice and collective wellbeing grapple with— How do we simultaneously hold our obligations to the collective and our obligations to ourselves? If we show up for others and not for ourselves, we risk slipping into saviordom, which can perpetuate top-down dynamics, rob people on the margins of systemic power of their agency, and burn us out. On the other hand, if we only show up for ourselves but not for others, we abdicate our responsibility to the collective, and our complacency perpetuates injustice and collective dis-ease. And so, I believe we have a responsibility to learn to navigate the both-and, dancing between the polarity of self-care and collective-care over our days, weeks, and lifetimes. But because dominant culture does not train us to hold the both-and well and instead, teaches us to view the world as opposing binaries—good guys or bad guys, us or them, right or wrong—it can feel uncomfortable and challenging to hold the tension of conflicting values and realities. And so, most of us have a tendency to cling to one side of a polarity at the detriment of the whole. This either-or approach to life leads many people to all-or-nothing behavior—either working 24/7 or binging Netflix, either doing a daily self-care practice or none at all. And yet, the fact is that when we look closely, we can see that all of life expresses itself in polarities—apparent opposites that need each other to form a whole—night/day, birth/death, cold/hot, soft/hard, chaos/order, knowing/not knowing, yes/no, yin/yang, global/local, nature/nurture, receiving/giving, holding space for pain/holding space for joy, this is a nightmarish time / this is an extraordinary time. To bring forth the word that we long for, we must learn to perceive, honor, and skillfully navigate the polarities inherent in our work and in all of life. It is true that those of us who are committed to showing up on the front-lines of life and liberation are unlikely to find any perfect balance or to escape the tensions inherent in the conflicting realities we face. And yet, we humans do have the inherent potential to cultivate the capacity to hold the tensions in ways that make us proud. We can learn to show up for social change and take good care of ourselves, give and receive, say yes and say no, act and rest, be effective and have fun. Like all of creation, we are designed to honor the full expression of life living through us. For instance, one of my core values is solidarity, and this value often demands long hours of me. And yet,
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