Our most pressing challenge right now is not global warming, school security, or building a wall against Mexico. Somewhere in the DNA of all those troubles is an aberrant code which is undermining our success in working together for solutions that really matter.
Simply put, we can’t work creatively together if we can’t get along; and we can’t get along if we ignore or neglect the practical wisdom regarding what makes for healthy connections.
Genuine community is a chronic obsession of mine in this blog on creative change. It seems patently obvious to me that our human future is the future of all humans, not just a few or some. We may pin our hopes on a salvation by god or technology, but if we persist in our ignórance of what genuine community requires of us, in the end there will be no one left to save.
Let’s see if we can get this practical wisdom in front of us and make sense of it. When it comes to healthy connections, which are what provide the conditions for genuine community to arise, the whole picture can be simplified as a balance of power and love. Unless there is a dynamic balance of these two factors a relationship will not be what I’m calling a ‘healthy connection’, and consequently it will compromise rather than empower genuine community.
It will help if we make this personal, so I’ll ask you bring to mind one of your most important relationships right now. In what follows, you will take the perspective of “Me” in the illustration above, and your partner will be “You.” (Don’t be confused: it will make sense as we go.)
Both you and your partner need to be in positions of power for your relationship to be healthy. As I’m using the term here, power is not associated with dominance, aggression, or manipulation, but is instead the virtue of inner strength that results from being securely centered in yourself. Thus centered, you have direct inner access to your own human needs, individual voice, and personal will.
What we call the human spirit is channeled not only through what makes you both human (your basic needs), but also through what makes you unique persons and different from each other.
‘Voice’ refers to the expression of your individual perspectives, interests, and choices. A healthy connection honors how each of you ‘leans into life’, as we might say. ‘Will’ includes your personal desires and commitment to what you want to ‘make real’ (or realize) through active intention. When you and your partner are each centered in all three – your needs, voice, and will – your relationship can become the synergy (1+1=3) of what you both bring to the encounter.
We have to qualify the statement by saying that synergy is still only a possibility at this point because the other factor in the balance has yet to be considered. Love is the willingness (recall that will is power) to make room for – literally to “accommodate” – the needs, voice, and will of your partner. Staying true to yourself and remaining centered in your own power is thus counterbalanced by a commitment to protect the right (and responsibility) of your partner to do the same.
Admittedly this definition of love sounds less like the warm affection and ardent regard that are traditionally identified with it. But in the balance of power and love which is the heart of a healthy connection, love does not simply play the ‘soft and gooey’ to power’s ‘hard and prickly’ stereotype.
While power is a function of your own integrity, love (as altruism) is opening to your partner as an equal, respecting her needs, listening to his voice, and including his or her will in your shared construction of meaning (or dialogue).
In short, love means that you genuinely care.
To the degree that you are stuck in the stereotypes of ‘prickly’ power versus ‘gooey’ love, these essential factors are difficult if not impossible to balance. Add to this the fact that you, insofar as you are a normal person, tend to lose your center when the forces of stress and change threaten your security – which you then try to recapture by manipulating the world around you – it’s not surprising that ‘power grabs’ are your strategem of choice when things break down.
I find it interesting the way our Western mind has parted-out power to business and politics, love to morality and religion, and truth to science and philosophy. This evident schizophrenia – whom can we trust to reveal what really matters? – is presently keeping us as a culture from the grounded and responsible orientation in reality that we seek.
Such a creative re-orientation will come as we are able to join together in genuine community. One day we will engage a dialogue and co-create a world big enough to include us all. That day will indeed be the dawn of a new age.
Before that day can come, however, and as we struggle in these ‘end times’ of our present age, one against another, we will need to learn how to honor the sacred balance of power and love.
Only this truth can set us free.
Tracts of Revolution 