Are You Stuck in Your Head?

Sent by Lauren Jane Heller    |    February 25, 2021

This section of Martin Buber’s “I and Thou” showed up in my inbox from Maria Popova yesterday, and I have to say, it was just the antidote I needed for this morning's feeling of disconnection. I consider a tree.

I can look on it as a picture: stiff column in a shock of light, or splash of green shot with the delicate blue and silver of the background.
I can perceive it as movement: flowing veins on clinging, pressing pith, suck of the roots, breathing of the leaves, ceaseless commerce with earth and air—and the obscure growth itself.

I can classify it in a species and study it as a type in its structure and mode of life.

I can subdue its actual presence and form so sternly that I recognise it only as an expression of law — of the laws in accordance with which a constant opposition of forces is continually adjusted, or of those in accordance with which the component substances mingle and separate.

I can dissipate it and perpetuate it in number, in pure numerical relation.

In all this the tree remains my object, occupies space and time, and has its nature and constitution.

It can, however, also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is now no longer It. I have been seized by the power of exclusiveness.

To effect this it is not necessary for me to give up any of the ways in which I consider the tree. There is nothing from which I would have to turn my eyes away in order to see, and no knowledge that I would have to forget. Rather is everything, picture and movement, species and type, law and number, indivisibly united in this event.

Everything belonging to the tree is in this: its form and structure, its colours and chemical composition, its intercourse with the elements and with the stars, are all present in a single whole.

The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no value depending on my mood; but it is bodied over against me and has to do with me, as I with it — only in a different way.

Let no attempt be made to sap the strength from the meaning of the relation: relation is mutual.
...

The tree will have a consciousness, then, similar to our own? Of that I have no experience. But do you wish, through seeming to succeed in it with yourself, once again to disintegrate that which cannot be disintegrated? I encounter no soul or dryad of the tree, but the tree itself.
It’s easy to become so swept up with work, with doing, with making things happen, that I become untethered from all of the other things that exist right here and not in some imaginary future. 

The shift from being in relation with the world and the other parts of it to looping in my head is so swift and seamless that sometimes I don’t even notice. And then, I feel tightness in my chest, the heaviness in my shoulders. I notice the anxiety swirling, my thoughts spinning round and it takes a jolt, a remembering, a coming back — whether to my mutual relation with a tree or the jasmine that’s blooming on my desk, or even to another person: that they are not simply some person external to me but part of my relationship with myself and the world — we are connected. I can learn from them, with them and cherish the interplay and connectivity between us, whether it feels good or bad, brings up fear or joy.

I may have mentioned lately my personal work of expanding my capacity for fear: of recognizing that the resistance and wishful thinking, the pretending and procrastinating that happens when I allow fear to overwhelm my senses and colonize my mind can be rendered small if I allow myself the space to feel as enormous as I am. 

The fear can simply be a thorn, reminding me of possible discomfort or warning me of the dangers of plunging into the unknown, but not so big that I need to dwell on it. 

When I remind myself that I’m a part of something so incredibly interconnected and marvellous — so expansive as to be unfathomable, it can help me to get back to remembering what I’m committed to. I can be without doing, and when I am doing, the energy behind it can be that of love and purpose rather than fear of falling behind or getting it wrong. 

It helps to remember that. 

And today, I'm grateful for the reminder.