In the back seat

Some highlights from this talk:

(…) I think that security is elusive, it’s impossible. We all die. We all get old. We all get sick. People leave us. People change us. Nothing is secure. And that’s actually the good news.

This is, of course, unless your whole life is about being secure. I think that when that is the focus of your life, these are the things that happen. You can’t travel very far or venture too far outside a certain circle. You can’t allow too many conflicting ideas into your mind at one time as they might confuse you or challenge you. You can’t open yourself to new experiences, new people, new ways of doing things. They might take you off course. You can’t not know who you are, so you cling to hard-matter identity. You become a Christian, Muslim, Jew. You’re an Indian, Egyptian, Italian, American. You’re a heterosexual or a homosexual, or you never have sex. Or at least, that’s what you say when you identify yourself. You become part of an “us.” In order to be secure, you defend against “them.” You cling to your land because it is your secure place. You must fight anyone who encroaches upon it. You become your nation. You become your religion. You become whatever it is that will freeze you, numb you and protect you from doubt or change. But all this does actually, is shut down your mind. In reality, it does not really make you safer.

(…) All this striving for security, in fact, has made you much more insecure because now, you have to watch out all the time. There are people not like you. People who you now call enemies, you have places you cannot go, thoughts you cannot think, worlds that you can no longer inhabit. And so you spend your days fighting things off, defending your territory, and becoming more entrenched in your fundamental thinking. Your days become devoted to protecting yourself. This becomes your mission. That is all you do. Ideas get shorter. They become sound bytes. There are evil-doers and saints, criminals and victims.

There are those who, if they’re, not with us, are against us. It gets easier to hurt people because you do not feel what’s inside them. It’s easier to lock them up, force them to be naked, humiliate them, occupy them, invade them and kill them because they are only obstacles now to your security.

(…)

I think what I’m trying to say here, is that if your end goal is security, and if that’s all you’re focusing on, what ends up happening, is that you create not only more insecurity in other people, but you make yourself far more insecure. Real security is contemplating death, not pretending it doesn’t exist. Not running from loss, but entering grief, surrendering to sorrow. Real security is not knowing something when you don’t know it. Real security is hungering for connection rather than power. It cannot be bought or arranged or made with bombs. it is deeper, it is a process, it is acute awareness that we are all utterly inter-bended, and one action by one being in one tiny town, has consequences everywhere. Real security is not only being able to tolerate mystery, complexity, ambiguity, and hungering for them. and only trusting a situation when they are present.

(…) we are all essentially permanently displaced people. All of us are refugees. We come from somewhere and we are hopefully traveling all the time, moving towards a new place. Freedom means I may not be identified as any one group, but that I can visit and find myself in every group. It does not mean that I don’t have values or beliefs, but it does mean I am not hardened around them. I do not use them as weapons. In the shared future, it will be just that, shared. The end goal will becoming vulnerable, realizing the place of our connection to one another, rather than becoming secure, in control, and alone. (…)