Our Relationship with Life
Relationships are more important than things. But we still treat one another as things rather than as persons.
We are Takers not Givers
Our economic system has created a prison within which we live a life of ruthless competition, extreme individualism and insatiable greed. We fight to grow what we have by taking from the other. We have become takers not givers. We have become ‘extractivists’. We extract fossil energy, minerals and sand from the earth without a thought to ‘giving’ for the protection of the future. We extract work from human persons treating them as resources and giving them very little in return. We extract benefits from people, using them as conveniences and throwing them away once their utility is over. Inasmuch as we use others, we ourselves are used by Media, Business and Government. This ‘extractivist’ mind — set grows from a sense of ‘poverty’. From a belief that we need to protect what we have and that we can grow it only by snatching from the other. We find it very difficult to grow the whole cake so that there is enough for all. Because even if the cake does grow, only a miniscule number of individuals get rewarded disproportionately, creating glaring income disparities. The vast majority still struggle to survive.
Alan Weiss author of ‘Our Emperors have no clothes’ states :
“When cheating the other party is considered merely good business sense, and lying is admired as an excellent negotiating trait, individuals can get rich but economies will not prosper.”
We are like Porcupines
We go into isolation trying to protect what we have. We approach life as if we are porcupines. Believing that life is waiting to attack us. To take from us whatever we have. We build our little fortresses or prisons around us. We are filled with fear. There is uncertainty lurking everywhere. Our relationship with life becomes adversarial.
Our ‘Museum of Negativity’
We become suspicious of everything and everybody. Ready to fight or flee. That is how we have survived over thousands of years. The poet Michael Palmer has called our mind a ‘museum of negativity’. We seem to see negativity even in the positive. Just think of the feedback you may have received while working in an organisation. Your mind dwelt more on the negative than on the positive.
In order to come out of this mind-set we need to realise that no matter how much the other appears to be the devil, he/she is really hiding behind a façade and we are deceived by it. Both of us are victims of fear and uncertainty. We can’t fight against this shield. We need to work behind it building trust and empathy. Transformation can’t come through confrontation, argument and logic. Transformation can come only through a change of heart.
We cannot fight hate with hate. We need to fight hate with love. The poet Maya Angelou shared her journey of self -discovery and healing after being raped as a teenager. She says
“eventually I had to realize that I was my rapist; that the anger that was in him was in me as well. I am a human being; nothing that is human is foreign to me.”
When this deep interconnectedness, interrelatedness and ‘interbeing’ is experienced one is transformed. I realise that the enemy is me.
I-IT to I-Thou
We need to move from an ‘I-It’ relationship where we treat others and the earth as things to be exploited, to an ‘I-Thou’ relationship where we treat others as persons and respect the earth as our common home. Where we co-create and collaborate with not only one another but also with the earth. Where we don’t look at extracting from the other for personal gain but ‘working with’ for mutual fulfillment. Where we discern how life is continuously giving to life every moment of the day. The earth is alive and generous.
We need to come out of our sense of poverty to experience the abundance in our lives which already exists, if only we can see and be grateful.
