Capacious Hearts
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Capacious Hearts
I wrote very early on in this newsletter series about emotional contradictions. The pandemic highlighted for me how difficult it is to find harmony when you are pulled between such a wide range of emotions.
Personally, I feel blessed, fortunate, happy, and at peace with most things in my life. But when zooming out, I feel burdened, depressed, and quite anxious about the many challenges facing us collectively. The pandemic, as bad as it has been, has helped me acclimate to this new reality, at least. Or so I thought. But then the war has struck a chord with me, once again. This tragic reminder of how fragile our world is has made me revisit these unpleasant feelings of emotional juxtapositions.
A dominant aspect of modern culture is our proclivity for biases, in general, and binary biases, in particular. We draw conclusions about the world based on our very personal circumstances and lived experiences. It's normal and it's natural. And it is also not a bad thing. It's only bad when big decisions affecting many people are made without a diverse set of perspectives. If you have broad inputs, you typically have broad support for outputs. Or, as a mentor reminded me often: "People support what they help create".
It is the binary nature of our culture that I struggle the most with. We have lost the space between the polar opposites of ideas. We see and judge things as one or the other, black or white, left or right, red or blue. Our tendency to jump to the extreme end of a wide continuum of choices is perhaps convenient and can help score points or sell clicks, but it is NOT helpful in elevating understanding or in enabling cooperation and collaboration between people.
So, has this binary tendency also affected our hearts?
I fear that the rise in loneliness and anxiety has contributed to a shrinking of our hearts. Or, perhaps we are stuck in a negative spiral of sorts. One where we are shrinking the space in our hearts, creating less and less room for new ideas or new people, which makes us lonelier. The atrophy of empathy with its accompanying hostility to what's foreign is an all-too-common pattern when the world as we know it is in flux. We grab on to what we know, we reject what we don't, and we close in on the circles of comfort.
I listened to a wonderful podcast this week with Krista Tippett and the incredible children's author, Kate DiCamillo. The essence of their conversation centered around the following question:
How can we tell the truth and make that truth bearable?
While they were mainly discussing this as it relates to children, I think the question is equally relevant for our public conversation.
Herein lies our problem: we don't like to talk about problems. And, therefore, we don't tell the full truth. In order to do so, we would have to acknowledge the extent of the problems before us. And to some extent, it might be, to paraphrase Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men: because we really can't handle the truth.
But we don't lie or hide the truth with malicious intent. At least, most of us don't. We do it out of an aspect of love, which is the impulse to shield, to protect. We believe both as parents and as adults, that telling the full truth might not be necessary at all times. And the more we ignore the uncomfortable side of reality, the more difficult the ultimate awakening becomes. Because sooner or later, truth typically finds its way back to us. And what's worse is that when we realize the distance between what we were told and what we experienced, significant trust is lost.
When Kate won her second Newbury Medal, she said this:
"We have been given the sacred task of making hearts large through story. We are working to make hearts that are capable of containing much joy and much sorrow, hearts capacious enough to contain the complexities and mysteries … of ourselves and of each other.”
That really moved me. And I fell in love with the word CAPACIOUS. It's such a wonderful word. Spacious. Roomy. Just the notion of a more capacious heart filled me with joy.
We are all storytellers. We shape our culture through the stories we tell and the narratives we live. Our job is to enlarge our collective hearts such that they can welcome more love, more tolerance, and more understanding.
I found their conversation to be so relevant for how we all can restore and repair our public conversation. This is, of course, exactly what I hope to contribute towards in sending out these missives each Sunday morning.
Kate ends with why she loves Charlotte's Web so much, and how E.B. White could write such a beautiful story. Here is Kate's own answer:
“And I think that you won’t be surprised to learn that the only answer I could come up with was love. E. B. White loved the world. And in loving the world, he told the truth about it — its sorrow, its heartbreak, its devastating beauty. He trusted his readers enough to tell them the truth, and with that truth came comfort and a feeling that we were not alone.
I think our job is to trust our readers.
I think our job is to see and to let ourselves be seen.
I think our job is to love the world.”
Wow. The notion that a more capacious heart can embrace both the beauty and the challenges we all face in our lives is important and truly relevant to our current times.
While most of us are not children's authors, we do send a lot of signals out in this world. I will try harder to expand my capacity for love. It is not only a renewable source of energy, but it's actually a multiplicative and perhaps exponential one, as well. Meaning, the more we all send, the more we all get. Isn't that great!
Here are a few links from last week:
On Being and Krista Tippett interview with Kate DiCamillo. Please listen on a beautiful walk in nature and take it all in.
Kevin Kelly's TED talk from this summer on why he is an optimist should be required listening for humanity. He lays out the reasons for optimism. I so much agree, and his conclusion that "without problems, there is no progress" resonates fully with me. Optimists see problems as conduits, not obstacles, for progress. If you missed Kevin’s article from Warp News this summer on the case for optimism you can read it here.
Another great interview with Yuval Noah Harari, this time with Sam Harris around the war in Ukraine. Always illuminating.
I thought Arnold Schwarzenegger's Atlantic article was inspiring
I did like to see NYT editorial board bringing up our free speech problem in our culture. I see that as a sign that we might have reached a turning point.
I will end with something the Swedish artist, Tomas DiLeva, often reminded us of: "There is only one race. The human race. And there is only one religion. Love.
True that!
