Is it possible that everything is just fine?

Perhaps unfolding in a pattern that looks a lot like how life has evolved on this planet for a millennia?

View from the FNCA.

I’ve been home for a bit from my second church camp experience of the summer, the FNCA in Fryeburg, ME where the topic of community was mulled over, reflected on and lived out over the course of 7 days. It was a refreshing week as there was a lot of honesty about the rift that seems to exist at the moment between what people are needing and what institutions that have thus far been created to foster community (religious, political, medical, academic, etc.) are offering.

In sitting with the reality of this rift, and the reality of all of the lovely humans assembled and the towering pines out the lecture hall window, the thought started to settle in that maybe….maybe this rift was not a problem “to be solved,” but a reality to be weathered. I started imagining all of the millennia of evolution on this planet, the upheaval and stressful environments that brought destruction AND fostered the evolution of new life.

What if everything is in fact just fine?

Fine not in a static way, but in a larger forces are at work kind of a way, where the destruction and maladaptation that we witness on the outside is occurring not because our species is devolving, but because we are growing, and more and more of who we have been thus far as a species is coming into the light.

Thus far the civilizations that we have formed, while speckled with luminaries who have pointed to the deeper truth of our oneness, have overwhelmingly been operating on principles of competition and separateness. While perhaps for a time this competition motivated us to discover our best, to create, to reach new heights of human ingenuity and performance, it seems to me that this competitiveness has outworn its usefulness. At this point in our evolution if our self understanding is grounded in believing we are here to compete with one another even the most accomplished among us will inevitably feel deeply dissatisfied with their lives. There are too many categories that have been discovered on which to compete! Speed, skill, beauty, peacefulness, strength, sexual attractiveness, popularity, wealth, social capital, creativity, intelligence, appearance, discipline, humor, productivity, clarity, playfulness, knowledge, health, diligence….. While we may gain some satisfaction by being a “winner” in some categories there are so many that we will inevitably feel ourselves more often to be failures.

I think of my grandparents who didn’t share much with me about their inner lives, but I know from the outside felt quite pleased with themselves in their ability to succeed economically. My sense of them is that this was the one category that really mattered and they didn’t pay much mind to the other categories of well being. I am grateful to my parent’s generation for considering other categories of well being, AND it seems competitiveness was still at play, competing now to be the “happiest” family, or the most “fulfilled,” or whatever that means. Now as I stand in adulthood and seek to forge a life, I see competitiveness as the true obstacle to happiness. I am interested in discovering what it looks and feels like to live a life not focused on measuring up to external categories of success or failure, but instead being faithful to the more mysterious measure of feeling good within myself, in alignment with the life flowing in and around me.

This is a very different way to live. It’s a hard shift to make. Every day I find myself becoming aware of new parts of myself that have been out of alignment, driven by fear and selfishness. And the institutions of our larger world were not built to foster this kind of inner alignment so as we grow we can feel more and more at odds with the external world. AND perhaps this is all just fine. Perhaps this is how change will come.

There is a rift in our world right now, between what has been, what is happening now, and what many of us long to bring into being. It is my belief that this rift is necessary, a growing edge that we need to embrace and participate in. Let us not sit on the sidelines and criticize. Let us not live in delusion barricaded inside dying institutions. Let us be open to the growth that this moment is inviting us into, connect with the deepest truth that those luminaries have been proclaiming for so long, and discover the luminary within us all. A new path of cooperation and collaboration that can make a whole new era of creativity, ingenuity and performance possible.