To be honest, I’ve been trying to write this post for about a week now. I was planning to do this whole exegesis about Job 2:11-13 where Job’s friends come to see him. They basically see what a state Job is in and all they can really do is just sit there and be with him. Then I was going to try and write about the sephirot of Binah. Binah is, and I’m using the occult version of Kabbalah here (not strictly Jewish), simplistically, “understanding,” but in my experience this sephirot is where all sorrows, beginnings, and endings are. It’s usually equated to the divine feminine or Goddess energy and in my experience, when I’ve gone there it definitely feels womb-like.

I’m writing this now, and I’m realizing that both of these are applicable to the last three weeks. A good friend was in the hospital, and, especially at first, I felt like Job’s friends. All we could really do was sit and wait with her wife and do the little things to help. It never really feels like enough, but, at least intellectually, there’s not much else one can do. (Thankfully she’s home now!) A couple other situations had me feeling like Job, where I was doubting myself and wondering if I had done something to warrant punishment from the Spirits. Then, at the beginning of this week, I was feeling as if I was in Binah, most firmly and completely so.

But my mistake was trying to figure it all out on my own by keeping it to myself. Or, to put it another way, I’m extremely bad at taking my own advice. Coming out of that state this week got me thinking about the fact that we are programmed this way, especially here in the US. We’re taught that we’re supposed to do everything ourselves. Our independence, and ability “to do it all,” is lauded as some grand virtue, and yet we suffer needlessly for it. Sometimes I think maybe what we’re seeing on the internet is a result of this and not the technology itself. We’re so indoctrinated to have absolute opinions that we’ve figured out by ourselves that when we’re confronted with the global community of the internet, we just don’t know how to handle it. We start to see that we’re not the only people who have feelings, heartache, and bad things happening. We’re not the islands of specialness we thought we were. The indoctrination we’ve received then translates this as us having no value or that we’re no longer interesting.

The hardest part of this, though, is that what we’ve been taught is a lie. Asking for help, or emotional support, or taking refuge in community isn’t a failure of independence nor does it mean that we don’t have a uniqueness that is valuable to said community. The only thing that it means is that we’re human. This is the hardest idea to accept because of our drive to do everything ourselves or to be the one who is “right” all the time. Mistakes, disappointments, and failure is going to happen regardless because we can’t avoid it.

Thinking about this in terms of social justice, we all fail miserably. We want inclusion, justice, and change, but we demand perfection instead of compromise. We demand immediate change from people instead of working with our mutual humanity. We see people as failures if they don’t see things exactly our way. I know I’ve failed spectacularly in this myself and I’ve let these failures take on a proportion that was far larger than what I actually did. I know I’ve expected people to behave in the way I wanted them to instead of how they are. While sometimes it’s necessary to challenge people about their actions, expecting people to “get it” or change overnight is futile because they, too, are human beings. Sometimes the “truth” isn’t the most compassionate way to handle a situation. Sometimes we have to walk away from people, and sometimes we have to rethink our ideas of how the world works. Our human-ness is a shifting and moving thing and we’re always having to learn, or re-learn, what being human means.

OK, I’m getting pretty deep here. Most of this is navel gazing, really, and I’ll have something more interesting next week. I did need to get it out of my system, though. Thanks, and if you have thoughts about this feel free to comment.