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April 26, 2015

We Just Want to Click.

gazing into each other'e eyes

As human beings we crave connection.

We just want to click. With people, places, ideas and experiences. We just want to relate. And we want it as often as possible.

I feel compelled to remind us, all of us, to not be so hard on ourselves when we feel threatened by incompatibility.

Not to judge ourselves when we’re triggered by dissonance, differences or opposition. This feeling of resistance is an organic response stemming from a place of love.

It’s not our differences, our perceived weaknesses or flaws, but our reaction to them that causes suffering.

The decision, often quite unconscious, to feel “less than,” is the chief causal factor associated to our suffering.

We just want connection.

It’s what we seek naturally, inherently, like beacons radiating into the night. Warm, ultrasonic waves of searching. Magnetically seeking a likeminded fit. A click.

I have always felt threatened by other people’s differences.

I have always craved sameness. The “click,” if you will. It has taken me 26 years to understand this about myself and I suspect I’ll spend the next 26 or more, if I’m so blessed, investigating why I’m like this.

I just want to connect. We just want to connect.

It’s not about jealousy, it’s not about envy, it’s not about disagreement, judgement, competition or comparison. These are all the weaker—I’m talking ice cubes in your decaf drip, watered down whiskey weak—forms of something much greater.

They appear in these feeble configurations to distract us from what’s really going on.

The root of everything is love.

The source of everything is love. Whether we recognize it on a daily basis or not, that is truth. That is gospel.

But when our delicate human psyches get swept up in the tidal wave of sickly exterior shapes like jealousy, comparison and judgement of self and others, we lose all contact with that source.

This is the sweet nectar from which ugliness can spring. Because, remember, there is no duality. Everything is a spectrum. Love rests easily on one end, rage burns furiously in the middle and hate hangs haphazardly from the far end.

The transparency of the matter is that we can be so damn hard on ourselves for something that is simply in our nature (at least I know I can be, so I assume you can be, too).

I have spent many years unconsciously berating myself—which manifests usually as a deep ache in my belly, a nervousness in my limbs, a scattering of my thoughts—for not being able to just accept the differences of others.

The extraordinary flood of satisfaction I have experienced when I’ve met people whose checklists line up with mine (yes, yes, it all matches up, check, check, check!) and then the fretful free fall of disappointment when one of us changes, or some difference is exposed and I feel a gap wedged between us.

My brow furrows, is the gap traversable? How do we connect now that we’re not the same?

It’s funny to write this out, to really begin to dissect the concept.

I know most people don’t think like me (because, well, most people are not highly sensitive, Type-A, overanalyzing, introverted intuitive). So, if you’re reading this thinking, “What’s wrong with this chick? We’re different, duh, what’s the problem?” then good on ya!

That makes me bounce happily on my bouncy-ball-desk-chair for you. Because you get it. You see through the veils of weaker interpretation. You see that the differences are all perceived. They’re masks.

What’s underneath is love. What lies below is the universal pulse that inevitably connects every one of our sorry hearts: the quest.

The quest for love, connection, that “click,” the energy of feeling totally understood and held and supported.

If we could put on horse blinders and dull our senses and just see one another straight up, no fancy dressings, we would see the “soul and not the story,” as my teacher Seane Corn says.

We would see that our preferences, practices, opinions, beliefs, mother tongue, skin color, stature, orientation and political party are nothing more than obligatory check marks in boxes on a list made by society.

Barriers and borders erected in an attempt to to block the flow of love. 

Once we see this, once we realize that being triggered by differences and perceived incompatibilities are just organic responses stemming from a source rooted in love, we can begin to artfully rewire the innate reaction we have to resistance.

Relephant:

Finding Human Connection at 30,000 Feet.

~

Author: Sara Courter

Editor: Ashleigh Hitchcock

Photo: flikr

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