It is what it is.

‘There’s too much emotion, too much negative emotion: frustration, hatred, anger.

Let us forget these difficult things, these emotions, and make personal friends.

then we can start to talk about these serious matters.’

   -The Dalai Lama, ‘War is Old-Fashioned’, Ode Magazine, Sept 2007

I

July, 2007
Robby and I spent ten days on a remote island up the BC coast this July. Wind and solar power, camp shower, outhouse with astonishing view, quiet except for the croak of ravens and the slap of small whales along the bay.

Daily swims from a stony beach in front of our small house ranged from ssstimulating cold to ‘almost like a bathtub’. Read, rest, sit, walk, swim, it was heaven.

On the bookshelf I found and read “The Cinderella Complex”. Published in 1981, it looks at the uneasy conflict of the push for independence and the desire to be cared for. Colette Dowling is relentless in her examination of this dynamic, in her own life and that of others. She discusses how we deny our desire to be cared for, as something distasteful and politically uncorrect. It dives underground and the conflict between the secret wish and the drive for independence drains our energy, ‘like a furnace trying to heat a house when the windows have been left open.’

The way out of this energy drain is through …’scrupulous attention to …your motives,… attitudes and …ways of thinking about things.’ Useful advice, for even noticing the apparently contradictory impulses reveals a wealth of information about this stream of being that we call our self.

It occurs to me that if we can integrate the idea of interdependence into our world view, that we are all independent individuals inextricably bound and responsible to each other, it may soften the apparent division.

What do you think?