No matter what happens we belong in the world
Dear Friends,
A book group in our meditation sangha has been reading You Belong by Sebene Selassie. It’s an excellent book, and the second time I have read it.
Right now, my feeling of belonging is challenged as I move through a personal crisis harder than anything I have faced before. When we emerge from this crucible, nothing and no one involved will be the same. There is much uncertainty and sadness, and in the past this would have caused me to feel separate from others. I would have felt I didn’t belong because of it or that I won’t belong if and when my life changes. But I know deep down that I still belong no matter what happens, and here’s a little about how I came to this insight:
I had my first understanding about belonging several years ago, and I explored it in a blog in 2016 (you can read that here). Interbeing is a word I learned from Thich Nhat Hanh, which means that we can only exist in relationship with each other. He describes it in his book How to Fight as:
“Interbeing is the understanding that nothing exists separately from anything else. We are all interconnected. By taking care of another person, you take care of yourself. By taking care of yourself, you take care of the other person. Happiness and safety are not individual matters. If you suffer, I suffer. If you are not safe, I am not safe. There is no way for me to be truly happy if you are suffering. If you can smile, I can smile too. The understanding of interbeing is very important. It helps us to remove the illusion of loneliness, and transform the anger that comes from the feeling of separation.”
Quantum physics has come to agree with Thich Nhat Hanh that Interbeing is the true state of our world. In New Science Magazine, physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli, writes:
“Things don’t have properties exclusive to themselves: their properties only exist by virtue of their relationship to other things, just like there are really no “chairs” without someone around to interact with them and see them as such.”
This understanding implies that there is no way to untangle ourselves from the rest of the universe, and therefore we always belong to everything in it. When Buddhist author and philosopher Alan Watts wrote "We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree," something clicked in my brain: Just as waves come from the ocean, people come from this universe.
Sebene writes in her book that even the painful situations we are experiencing in our larger world are the result of our mistaken belief in not belonging. She writes:
“Belonging is not about bypassing crises so we feel better within our individual bubbles. Things are the way they are because of various causes and conditions. Injustice exists because it has existed in the past. If things had been different, things would have turned out differently. But hundreds (maybe thousands) of years of separative thinking have led to the decimation of nature, the oppression of countless peoples, the destruction of many cultures, and the theft of vital resources… We’ve been trapped in our collective and individual crises of not belonging, not recognizing the answer is belonging to it all.”
When I feel like I don’t belong, I look out my window and remember that I grew from this earth just like the star magnolia and just like the crows cawing in the tree. Nothing, not one thing, can ever take me out of this wholeness. So when I think about the difficulties before me and what might happen to me personally or to the world, I remember that no matter what the outcome, I belong here and so do all my beloveds.
And this is true for you too.
No matter who you are or what you are going through right now,
No matter what has happened to you in the past or will happen to you in the future,
You belong on this earth and cannot be separated from all of it.
This is the only ground we have
And the only thing I know for certain.
