Closing the distance

Maybe being wise guardians of ourselves is to not guard ourselves so much, at all

There’s a space that I have kept from everyone I’ve ever encountered. A distance, an away-ness, a sometimes imperceptible but very real barrier through which I will not allow myself to cross, lest it bring me too close to something too real.

For a long time this seemed like the only wise and safe thing to do. Independence was my highest virtue. I can do it all on my own, and I don’t want you too close to know how or why I don’t need you, and you don’t really want to know who I am or what I fear, and I don’t really want to know any of this about you, either. I will laugh with you and cry with you and share with you but I will always retain a safe distance around the soft, squishy heart of whatever it is I am made of, because the wisest thing I can do is protect this and guard this and be sure that no one has access here. We are separate entities moving through starkly different worlds and my reliance is heavily and exclusively on myself.

As I have grown, this distance has begun to feel unwise. A dissonance has begun to bubble to the surface within me in the shape of a stinging awareness about what I want, what I actually want, perhaps what we all actually want, and who I am actually being. Perhaps, who we’re all actually being. I have begun to sense more than ever the deep, bottomless wells of longing that we all carry within us on some primary, eternal level as we all move through our life. I have begun to understand this distance I’ve always kept as nothing but a manifestation of fear, and I have begun to see more clearly just how much fear we are all keepers of, all the time, and how desperately we are all seeking safety, seeking connection — anything to alleviate this tender, shaking terror that we aren’t sure how to be guardians of.

I have felt this dissonance for some time, this undeniable longing for closer and clearer connection, this striking understanding about what we all truly want and need, and yet I have done very little to actually align with this. Over the years I have surely become more soft, and this barrier has thinned and changed from concrete barricades to a sort of leafy hedge that lets the sunlight through — but a barrier, a distance, still remains, and I can feel it. I can name the small, sincere choice I can make in this very moment to move in towards someone instead of away, and yet more often than not, I do not take it, or I take some watered down version of it. I feel myself want it, viscerally — my heart stretches and pushes up against this barrier, and I watch myself never break through in the way I know would feel like medicine, both to me and to another.

Internally, this conflict begins to build and it begins to feel like blatant dishonesty, a perplexing betrayal against not only what I want, but what I sense we all want — a choice that disregards this truth in service of my ego and its unrelenting self concern. This will make me look weak, weird, annoying. It might make someone else uncomfortable, it might make me uncomfortable. Probably best to stay in the small talk, drifting on the surface, never getting too deep.

But this dissonance and my increasing awareness of it has begun to wear on me lately. Maybe it’s because I understand more than ever how hungry we are for something real and something true in a world made of so much pretend. We decorate our bodies in brands and symbols, signaling to the world who we think we are and where we wish to belong, but it’s all pretend, and we know it. We spend our days in consuming entanglements with money and status, pouring our energy and attention into moving up, fretting when we move down, but it’s all pretend, and we know it. We concern ourselves with countless proxies for connection and meaning, but they are all pretend, not quite what we really want, and we know it. We have tiny and meaningless exchanges with others who we rarely see as real or important and never think about again, most of which happens through a glowing screen, all of it just mere blips in our busy days while we focus on the serious work of whatever it is that we fill our time with. We march through our lives humorlessly playing games of make-believe, cosplaying a “person” with all the right masks, but it’s all pretend, and we know it.

Now, it’s a funny thing: when you say, ‘I’m a person,’ the word ‘person’ is a word from the drama. The word ‘person’ in Latin is persona, that means ‘through sound.’ ‘Something through which sound comes.’ The persona (in Greco-Roman drama) was the mask worn by the actors, and because they acted on an open-air stage, the mouth was shaped like a small megaphone, and that would project the sound. So the person is the mask. Isn’t it funny, now, how we’ve forgotten that? And so Fosdick could write a book called How to Be a Real Person, which—if translated literally—is: ‘how to be a genuine fake.’ Because in the old sense, you see, the person is the role, the part played by the actor.

-Alan Watts

These roles and the distance we keep from one another so that we can safely play them out in the ways we believe we aught to, in one sense seems necessary and useful, but in another sense seems so blatantly silly, so futile, so hollow. On average, we have bigger houses, cars, paychecks, and opportunities than any humans before us and yet we sit on our throne of things feeling so alone, lost, scared, and spiritually starved.

It’s like we’re all in on this act, maintaining this somewhat convincing performance of being a proper, professional person in the world who has their shit together, demonstrating our proficiency through the ways we adorn our bodies and homes and resumés, collecting all the shiny things but being sure to move along quickly enough so that no one can ever really see the fear and messiness and pain that is lying just below the surface, the existential longing for something substantive, something true, anything true, running miles deep into the core of our existence. We wield our roles like weapons, keeping everyone away from our soft centers, doing all we can to Be a Person on stage while protecting this fragile fear we all carry around with us everywhere we go, behind the scenes.

Maybe this dichotomy has always been the human predicament — social creatures who easily get seduced by the trappings of social games and engagement, while always secretly hunting for something substantial, something we can actually survive on. Or maybe this is has all been created or exacerbated by our contemporary western culture, where individualism and capitalism and digitalization have bled into every last corner of how we see ourselves and others and engage with ourselves and others and generally move through and think about the world and our place in it.

It's hard to put a price tag, if you will, on the amount of human suffering that people are experiencing right now. In the last few decades, we've just lived through a dramatic pace of change. We move more, we change jobs more often, we are living with technology that has profoundly changed how we interact with each other and how we talk to each other. So we're seeing more forces that take us away from one another and fewer of the forces that used to bring us together.

Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, on the Loneliness Epidemic in America

Whether it’s ancient or new or something in between, lately this chasm we keep between each other so as to never get too close or too real or too honest, while simultaneously harboring a fierce desire for something, for anything, real and true and honest, is all I can see. The chasm between not wanting to risk vulnerability while desperately longing to find our symmetry in someone, in everyone, is all I can see. The chasm between my own desire to lean in and my actual actions when given the chance, is all I can see. How scared we all are, just beneath the surface of our polished veneers of togetherness, is all I can see. Just how connected we all are because of all of this aloneness we all feel, together, is all I can see.

Sometimes this distance really is the safe choice, and none of this is about forcing ourselves to do anything we don’t want to or are not ready to do, or unwittingly piling anything on anyone else. What I’m saying is just that when we actually look carefully at the heart of ourselves and the hardened barriers we use to protect this seemingly delicate internal space, we might discover that the balm for this unease and its ensuing isolation, disconnection, and separation, is actually the very thing we fear most: closing the distance instead of keeping it.

Photo by Jeannie Kho

So I want to pay attention to this space. These days, I want to be practiced at the work of carefully trimming away all the brush and branches and debris that stand between us, our barriers that we prune and dutifully maintain around our hearts and pain and humanness, and I want to clear a space down in the rich soil on which we stand, the sacred ground that we never want to be seen but also want to be seen more than anything else, and I want to sit here and share honestly here and plant flowers here and look around at all the colors and darkness, together. I want to cultivate gentleness here. I want to grow love here.

I want to let myself, let us all, play Make Believe in our Barbie Dream Houses as needed, because sometimes it really is, but I want to remember that just beneath the surface of these pretend pursuits and masks and personas is, in each of us, who and what we actually are, what we are actually doing here. I want to remember that though we are all scared about all of that, we are all here, together.

Maybe to be wise guardians of our own terror in this life is to be guardians of everyone else’s terror, too. To dive into the harrowing core of all we hide from each other and lend each other hands as we carry the heaping entirety of it out into the healing daylight together, where we can laugh at how mostly it is all the same. Maybe it is to give more of ourselves where and when we can, to exercise sincerity and curiosity and generosity instead of rehearsed responses, to bit by bit trade in our daggers and weaponry of defense for compassion and closeness. Maybe it is to understand that though boundaries are sometimes necessary they need not be barriers. Maybe it is to speak tenderly and honestly even when we fear it reveals too much or some weakness, and to respect and welcome in this softness from ourselves and everyone else — to let our hearts break, again and again and again.

Maybe to be wise guardians of ourselves in this life is to not guard ourselves so much at all, to instead to be guardians of everyone we encounter. To engage in big and tiny exchanges, with those we’ve known forever and those we’ve only met, from our beloveds to strangers on the other side of a glowing screen, and to remember just how much suffering is and has been brought upon us by others and by our own selves, how much fear that has caused in us that we carry with us all the time, and to viscerally sense how much we still hunger for connection and closeness — how much we require it as the balm for this pain. Maybe it is to decide to no longer deprive ourselves with empty proxies and to instead sit down at the table of this life and finally feast — to deeply nourish ourselves with something of real, meaningful substance. To allow ourselves to receive this sustenance, this connection, and to notice when someone else is hungering for it too — we are all hungering for it, always — and to give it, undiluted, unguarded, as best we can, when we can. To be gentle with ourselves and our own concerns of being too much or not enough first, so that we can then be gentle with these identical concerns in everyone else. Maybe it is to take precious, genuine care of each other.

Art by Francois Galland

I don’t want to keep this distance anymore. Because I see now that there’s nothing to keep anyone away from, except for my ego’s favorite story about what they might think of me should they see too much, should they see the truth. But The Truth — about who we are, about what this all is, about what it’s all for, about what it all means — is all we want, it is everything we want, it is what we are all out hunting for and hungering for in this life, and it is found, in part, precisely here. I want to feel when my heart is stretching and pushing up against my own barriers, and instead of locking the door, I want to softly break open, and through — because everything that actually matters is waiting on the other side.

Vulnerability is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or something we can arrange to do without, vulnerability is not a choice, vulnerability is the underlying, ever present and abiding undercurrent of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature, the attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to become something we are not and most especially, to close off our understanding of the grief of others. More seriously, in refusing our vulnerability we refuse the help needed at every turn of our existence and immobilize the essential, tidal and conversational foundations of our identity.

The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance; our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful, always at the gates of existence but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.

-David Whyte

We are not separate entities moving through different worlds, we are all here together in this one bizarre, beautiful, maddening and mysterious life. No matter what we like to tell ourselves, our reliance has always been surely and hopelessly, on each other. Closing the distance between us, even slightly; growing love and gentleness in this space, even slowly, is the medicine, is the meal, is the meaning we have been seeking. And we might find, when all is said and done, when all our pretend roles and convincing masks and proxy pursuits for truth fade away, that this is all there really is, and all there ever really was.

xo, Taylor

---

This has been a free and public post, thank you for reading. Please feel free to share it with anyone who you think might enjoy it, and if you would like to support my work, I invite you to consider becoming a paid subscriber: $50 gets you a full year of access.