Holding It All Together

Multi-tasking has become a sign of character, almost a virtue. The person who can hold more than one set of ideas in their heads and work with them simultaneously is to be admired and if possible emulated. Such a person has grip. Having grip, or focus, is a pre-requisite for success because where there is grip and focus, there is energy, forward momentum and a general ability to hold things together. Loss of grip leads to inner fragmentation and ultimate breakdown. Perhaps this is where our psyches reflect the disorder which surrounds us in the world; countries falling apart, entire regions without infrastructure of any kind, whose power-holders seem accountable to nobody, so that their grip on power depends on the extent to which they are able to generate and maintain fear over those they control. This in turn feeds their own fear, the fear of losing control, of losing power, or ‘grip’.

Somewhere there needs to be a change in the way we think about control and grip, both in our own lives and in the way many people experience power, either as holders of power or as victims. Perhaps we need to think differently about our inter-connectedness by getting a better sense of the two-way traffic of power and control, that we are both controlling and controlled when it comes to our human interrelatedness, our sociality.

Sociality is not something we can identify as a quantifiable cause or effect, something which can be pictured with the help of data and statistics. It is built into our emotional DNA and into the history of the human race and of the planet to which we all belong. We have an inbuilt fear of the unquantifiable, anarchic and strange, but the strange and the unquantifiable are also bound up with human longing, with dreams for the future and with the anticipation or uncertainty which they bring. Perhaps this is why we are so often checking things. We constantly check our emails, or whatever information may be available via the latest phone app, giving us the  latest statistic or result which could impact our lives, either directly or indirectly.

We worry and fret, often without knowing what it is we are worrying about. In fact the things which cause us to worry and fret are even built into our entertainment. Information is also entertainment but information which has become entertainment does not relieve fear, even for a moment. In fact it frequently has the opposite effect. We need a moment’s stillness to make sense of all the information before it merges with entertainment and  generates more fear. Fear creates barriers. It is the greatest destroyer of sociality.

I believe that the capacity for inner stillness is the way to true sociality. Inner stillness is enormously powerful. It reconnects us with one another by allowing for a deeper awareness of the sheer ‘is-ness’ of things, of ‘being’, which is life itself in its purest form. It enables us to let go of fear, so that things can regain their natural equilibrium, their level of sanity. 

Stillness makes us conscious of life’s depth and force by bringing us into the presence of God. This is where God is to be found and it is also what God is. He is the stillness which gives space for the life which holds all things together. He is also the life itself. No matter how hard a person works at religion, if they have not known God in stillness, they have achieved nothing. The very word ‘religion’ is taken from the Latin ligare  which means to ‘bind together’, not through force or psychological manipulation, but through the kind of love which is only fully experienced when we encounter God in this place of inner stillness.

He makes himself known, or recognised, in the most ordinary of social contexts, as he did for the two disciples who recognised the risen Christ ‘in the breaking of the bread’, in the context of an ordinary meal. In that moment they recognised something they had always known but never known so fully. It was a moment of truth. The encounter would have given them a new and more truthful way of understanding their place in the world. 

We can all have such moments, and the world needs us to have them. They come when we are able to relinquish our grip on the ‘must haves’ and ‘must do’s’ of life and return to stillness, to our own centre, bringing our troubled world with us, knowing that it is held there and, in some mysterious way, calmed, even if only for a moment. Try it.