On Vulnerability

While I was putting my daughter, who is almost three, to sleep last night, I got caught in one of those Awe moments that happen when we are lucky enough to tune in--it was the pure awe of watching this tiny, vulnerable human trust me completely. She just let me hold her, pet her hair, sing to her, and put her to sleep. And sleep, it seems, is one of the most vulnerable acts we can engage in.

I realized that I have a lot to learn from this little girl.

And it blows my mind--every single time I think of it--that I am just 100% in charge of her. She trusts me, needs me, looks up to me in ways I can't imagine (I don't remember being that age) and I am her protector. It is a huge job, and I do not take it lightly.

Then I think of all the small humans, throughout all time, who were not fortunate enough to be born into situations that are, like ours, safe and loving. Children are born into hell realms, in which they are abused, neglected, told they shouldn't be alive ... it goes on and on. I have watched enough news, had enough friends who worked in social services, and read enough psychology books to know how devastating it is.

And even those little humans--the ones in unsafe, broken situations--have to at least try to trust their caregivers, because their very survival depends on it. So they try and be kind, try and keep their mouths shut, try and turn their rage and their anger towards themselves. It makes perfect sense--it truly is the most intelligent way someone in this situation could stay afloat. The rage and the anger have to go somewhere, and the only safe place is for it to go deep inside. This is why, decades after the experiences, people are still afraid to share their experiences of this kind of abuse. They still fear for their very lives.

On a good day, when I am feeling connected to myself, my heart, and my health, I am able to see that every single person I meet is someone whose story I don't know. I really don't know--did this person grow up totally safe, secure, and loved? Or did they grow up with a message--explicit or implicit--that they were just not supposed to be alive? That they are unloved?

I think of my sweet little daughter, and realize that all of her needs are met because my husband and I are fortunate enough to be in, and from, situations that did not leave us psychologically empty inside. Sure, we have our issues, but we not only have the fortune to be aware of them ... we also have the good fortune to have had time and resources to work through them in meditation, therapy, and generally just in periods of self-reflection. All of this healing, then, gets passed onto our daughter, and we can only hope that she will be even better off psychologically than we were because of it. Then, she will pay that forward to the next generation, and, hopefully, this will all create a ripple of love into the river of the future.

In the end, if we feel safe enough to be vulnerable, then we are fully alive. When we are not safe enough to be vulnerable, we have locked up our own heart. And sure, we don't have to feel the pain and the rage when we do that, but it also means that we don't get to feel all the joy, the love, and the pleasure. The heart, as Kahlil Gibran so wisely said, is the self-same place that holds both our sorrow and our joy.

So, on those good days, I remember that the behavior I see in others--the forgetfulness, the confusion, the judgments, the rage--are likely to be the effects of a very unsafe childhood ... or of a trauma, or some situation that taught them to stop being vulnerable, and to shut down their hearts. I think of the thirteen year old boy from The Boy Who was Raised as a Dog, who committed a heinous murder ... and everyone was so outraged, until we all learned that he had grown up with a mother who thought it was okay to literally leave him alone, in the dark, in his crib, all day--day after day after day. I picture that little baby crying, all day every day--and then, eventually, he stopped crying. And because he stopped crying, his mother thought he was fine. But he was not fine--he was broken. Even before a year old, he had completely given up on the hope of love.

Instead of having compassion after hearing the stories, though, sometimes it might be even more helpful, and useful, to have it before we even know what the stories are. Of course having compassion does not mean allowing people to behave in hurtful, malicious ways. But it does mean that we aren't likely to judge someone just based on one little photograph of a moment. We truly have no idea--NO idea--what people have gone through.

Perhaps even just that small gap, in which we pause and consider that we may not fully understand someone, could heal the whole world, if each of us learned to stay in that gap, more and more, over the course of our lives.

Every single one of us was a tiny baby once. I chose this sweet picture of my little Zoe because she just embodies the essence of vulnerability here. All of her vital organs completely exposed to the world, and she's asleep and safe.

So many of us were born that way, but we forgot how to stay that way, because of circumstances beyond our control. It is a brave and powerful journey to heal those places, and stay vulnerable, so that we can pass that kind of love and joy onto the next generation.