I don’t like giving up on people.
I suspect it’s because, in a karmic kind of way, how I treat others invites a symmetric response, and if I give up on others, they too will give up on me. Conversely, if I find a way to relate to everyone, it invites a symmetric response for them to relate to me.
So here’s the way I’ve found myself growing towards this aspiration.
I’ve found that time and time again I like everyone, literally everyone, at the right distance. What does this mean? It means seeing relationships as an extremely high multidimensional space, made up of many axes of connection, and different degrees of intimacy and closeness within those axes. I can relate to every single person on a variety of axes, in a variety of ways, at a variety of distances, and I can find some combination to meet each and every person.
This looks like finding commonalities and discovering alignments, it looks like seeking differences and contrast to become aware of my own defaults, it looks like finding complementarities. It looks like a variety of things.
Superficially, this framework runs up against fundamental limitations in capacity, I have finite time and energy in my life. Yet time and time again, even if I don’t have capacity for a deep personal relationship, I can find still meaningful ways of striking the right distance. “Distance” means how personal and recurrent the relationship is. When I socially route someone to kindred spirits, I’m beginning to organize my relationships at a higher level, relating to many people through some kind of core set of similarities. When I organize my relationships at a group-level, it comes hand in hand with more distance in the relationship.
This perceived distance often proves to be closer than expected. The degree of serendipity in reality is freakishly and magically high, so even if I don’t have a diatic relationship with someone, by routing them to a group I still find myself with them when I least expect it, and they remain in my life through happy accident.
While initially this aspiration seems impossible, I continually find more and more opportunity to enact it my life, and to bring everyone into connection. Perhaps its an impossible standard, but there’s so much low hanging fruit that it seems well worth it to strive anyways.
In a kind of wild way, I see how slowly but surely I effect change on my social environment. I see how I have impacted so many people in my life, I see the people I have connected, the groups that have emerged, the romances that have budded, the projects that have coalesced. I have enormous personal impact on my little neighborhood of the world. I am powerful. Not in a way where I have power over others, but in way where I have changed the world in a bottom-up way, through a million actions aligned through a specific intention.
But none of this happens over night, its a long arc of continual belief and hope. I feel my faith being more and more rewarded, and that’s one of the reasons I’ve written this blog. The hardest time for any idea is in their infancy, where only faith can sustain them. Once the results come in, the hardest stage is long behind, and the belief has real force behind it. And with that confidence, comes a new phase: share it. Cut through that faithful infancy for others and make it easier to believe.
There’s another facet to this aspiration: I believe in meeting everyone where they’re at.
This feels related to finding the right distance somehow, that in meeting everyone where they’re at, the space of possibilities explodes.
To expect others to be more or less than what they already are is delusional. Getting angry or frustrated with them (or yourself) is to be in denial of reality. Having unfair hopes and expectations with them (or yourself) is equally in denial of reality. The only sensible thing is to meet reality as it is. This doesn’t mean become passive or giving up, it just means care without attachment to outcome.
A beautiful downstream effect of acceptance is that righteousness and imposition of my internal standards has waned, weakened, dissolved. There’s no point of applying my standard, to so do is to not be in acceptance with what they already are. As this lens atrophies, what’s left on the other side is spacious curiosity. Rather than narrowly searching for connection from what I already know or expect, I simply discover what we have in connection. My whole attitude shifts from a narrow discriminating search to something open-ended and expansive.
This narrow search has a pernicious kind of self-fulfilling cycle to it. The story I have is that in seeking something specific, I would rarely find it, I would feel scarcity, and I would double-down and search even harder. This cycle was defined by fear and control.
The expansivity has a glorious kind of self-fulfilling cycle to it too. It feels like a continual exercise in faith, where I go into every interaction with the tender conviction that through happy accident I will discover the richness within each and every person. By taking this open-ended approach, I am open to any kind of axis of connection, and quickly discover something totally unexpected and beautiful. Each time I am met, the prior reflex of control looses, I learn to trust in the overflowing abundance of the world a bit more, and a gradual and profound shift in attitude takes place.
I feel like I am only at the beginning of this journey, that perhaps the hardest part is behind me, and that after a long initial period of investment, a certain kind of power law may be beginning to take place. I don’t know, but there’s only one way to find out.