#10 - love is non-linear
#10 - love is non-linear
how to get on the same page
POV: I’m Hima - a South Asian, medium brown skin, cis-gender, able-bodied, straight woman living as a settler on the Indigenous lands, T’karonto. I was born in Scarborough, raised Gujarati-Jain, middle-class, with English as my first language. My parents immigrated by choice via London and East Africa and are still together. I have two sisters and no extended family living locally. I experience ADHD symptoms. Much of what I write will be informed by some of these lived experiences.
things open in tabs
Read: Black Girl in Maine writes about the ‘souls of white people’ and noting that what happened in DC is ‘the natural progression of a country built on lies, and never acknowledging or dealing with its sins’.
Learn: I’ve been digging a bit deeper into Speculative Design practices as part of an audio series I’m co-producing with Luminato and From Later, and this guide by Damien Lutz runs down some great techniques. I’ve been reflecting a lot on the difference between possible futures versus utopian/dystopian futures, and creating space for tension and contradiction.
Marvel: A delightful compilation of Chad Knight’s 3D sculptural works digitally placed in public spaces that if realized would surely fill us with eternal wonder and awe for one another.
Listen: To this bopping new track, ‘Stuck Inside,’ (while being stuck inside) by my R&B loving, 90s-forever, soul sis, Romana.
Prayer: ‘May all beings be seen, held kindly and loved. May we all one day surrender to the weight of being healed’ - Lama Rod Owens (S/O to Rina for the share)
Awaken: A series of digital art projects by Black, Indigenous and artists of colour presented by the Toronto History Museum including a digital short by Esie Mensah called ‘Revolution of Love’
contemplation
Sometimes when I am in a ‘work’ meeting, I imagine it as play that I’ve named 'the human theatre of collaboration’. I count how many times ‘awesome’ and ‘totally’ are said. I observe the craft in which someone dares to disagree, disrupting the chorus of nodding heads. I hold the uncomfortable silences, words hanging on the runway of wet tongues that are unable to securely launch. I wonder if anyone is watching me eat my snacks or manically take sips of a hot beverage, using repitious physicality to focus my mind and still my body in this setting that feels unnatural and stifling. But not all meetings are like this — in some, we start the conversation yapping about our morning routines, spiritual epiphanies, what we’re eating and how we felt this week, and end the conversation with ‘love you.’
So much of human life is spent simply trying to get on the same page. But, we rarely actually ever get on the same page. Usually, we surrender - ending a power struggle, succumbing to a power dynamic that is often hierarchal, yielding from passivity or sheer exhaustion, and in the best case, practicing genuine love and trust.
We surrender because to get on the same page and achieve alignment with a group of humans takes a tremendous amount of time, patience and listening while compassionately holding our own and another’s interior complexity and contradictions with full awareness - all of which are scarce when living in a linear, capitalist world. That being said - consensus can also be a hugely frustrating process. We just haven’t been trained to operate communally in the western world, and admittedly have not practiced the skills and endurance necessary.
Linear thinking is at the core of western imperialism and colonialism, which centres the logical mind, and a single truth, language and story of human history, versus acknowledging and allowing a plurality of truth. It is the white, European’s limited imagination of the world since the 14th century, the control of knowledge and subsequently how we all think - and the very thing slowly crumbling through the reclaimation of identity and memory across the world. Linearity prioritizes progress and growth over deeply intimate and reciprocal relationships with the living world - even though, I believe there is world where these ideas are not in conflict. And because our inner worlds are so clearly non-linear, and linearity is rarely found in nature, which operates in regenerative and symbiotic cycles, it is no surprise our inner and outer worlds can often feel out of sync.
To get on the same page, where everyone at the table feels heard and seen requires space for the heart and spirit to be equally present in rooms where decisions are being made — and actually taken as serious data point. Hierarchy is a shortcut to undercut relational work - and frankly, it works. Things do get done and move forward - but it’s usually at the benefit of some and the cost of others; someone always swallowing their needs until they choke on their resentment.
I’ve experienced both sides, surrendering to just move things forward, and the absolute magic and flow of deep alignment, when a group of people, vibrating in love and logic, are able to create in ways that defy spreadsheets and powerpoints. Often deep alignment happens through a shared and urgent mission, rooted in the depth of love for humans to experience freedom and liberation, and sometimes it happens through remapping ways of being, relating and seeing - creating safe containers for the heart, mind and spirit to be present in collaborative rooms, softening power dynamics. In rooms and organizations that have been set up for linear growth and progress, where financial pressures become physical, emotional and spiritual pressures, decisions and solutions are forced into logic, reentrenching power in a cycle that can feel indestructable.
‘The solution is never at the level of the problem. The solution is always love, which is beyond problems,’ says Deepak Chopra in an audio series called The Secret of Love that I have listened to about a hundred times. This audio series was fundamental in my process of knowing love to be an energetic field that is constant and can always be accessed as a creative force. Xiaohoa Michelle Ching, a new friend, is currently doing her PhD at the Department of Education at Harvard University with a single mission - to scale love into a legitimate and practical force and tool. If we can agree that ‘love is not an exchange economy,’ as said by author and activist, Valerie Kaur, then it is (and always has been) the force that can cut through linear thinking.
My partner and I can struggle to get on the same page (happening right now), like any relationship. Technically, we almost never want the same things, in the same way, at the same time, which makes sense because we are both fiercely complex beings - living the project of trying to find alignment with distinct ancestries, racial and gender vectors informing power and priviledge, cultural orientations, traumatic experiences, religious upbringings, interests, spiritual and political beliefs, financial needs and desires, and lifetimes lived before we met each other three and half years ago. We basically connect on three things: food, justice and community. Everything else is a process.
In coming to terms with the strangeness of being both close and familiar, while also different and distant, I often revisit this quote from an interview in 2009 with Barack Obama in the New Yorker.
And then what sustains our relationship is I’m extremely happy with her, and part of it has to do with the fact that she is at once completely familiar to me, so that I can be myself and she knows me very well and I trust her completely, but at the same time she is also a complete mystery to me in some ways. And there are times when we are lying in bed and I look over and sort of have a start. Because I realize here is this other person who is separate and different and has different memories and backgrounds and thoughts and feelings. It’s that tension between familiarity and mystery that makes for something strong, because, even as you build a life of trust and comfort and mutual support, you retain some sense of surprise or wonder about the other person
In the recent process of looking for a cottage/farmhouse/home, we have spent much time hunched over in spreadsheets mapping our financial reality, while also doing visioning work, asking ourselves how we want to feel, connect and steward land, and how can we make this a place for our families and communities to retreat and gather. The former aptitude comes pretty natural to us (well, mostly Ciaran), but the latter requires intention and it doesn’t always hold when in the trenches. It’s easy to get lost in real estate listings, coordinating appointments, assessing future land value, and confronting having to play the competitive realities of the market that pull you away from the heart and spirit parts of the equation. The homebuying experience is the epitomy of living in capitalism, a system birthed from stealing land and claiming private property, while navigating a linear/non-linear view of your life, desiring the emotional and health benefits of home and shelter, confronting the priviledge that you can even *think* about purchasing a home, and wanting to urgently dismantle the system.
In short, I lost my mind on him yesterday in a conversation about money (a touchey subject for us) and have been reflecting on what it means to move forward from here. My linear minds wants to figure it out immediately and move through this recurring pattern. ‘Book a session with Frank,’ I yelled, referring to our therapist, before moving into a sullen state. We spent yesterday in our own worlds, silently passing each other in the hallway, the hurt and tension thick as pudding. The reality is, we’ll never ‘figure it out’ - there are far too many data points. The only feasible way back to each other is love. It’s actually pretty simple. The only way to get on the same page, given our interior complexities and differences, is love, because logically, our relationship doesn’t make ‘sense.’
We’re still going to therapy later today, and I’m letting these questions simmer:
If decolonization of our systems includes our homes, how do I decolonize my relationship, I wondered?
What would it mean to not be on the same page and allow our respective truths, feelings and needs to just be as they are, without a need for resolution?
How can I feel physical safety without asserting my power?
What if forward is a circle - where do we go from here?