I was in Paris last week and besides being beautiful and inspiring, as always, it illuminated a question I've been living for a few years now. It's funny, looking back at my older posts, that I referenced the Rilke quote about living questions until some day you might find yourself living the answer. I posted that right before I left for Paris the last time, in June.
Paris is the one place where I'm not content to be an idle traveler. The first time I visited, nearly 6 years ago, I had only scheduled one night. I thought - what a cliche, how great can it be? What I didn't expect was how much it would resonate with me and inspire me. Sometimes there are reasons for cliches :) When I returned home after that first trip, I began to study French. I wanted to interact with the city the next time I returned. I wanted to understand and be understood.
Six years and four visits later, the city still has that effect on me. Yet though I've been learning French for awhile now, I found myself having difficulty actually using it while I'm in France. It's not necessarily because I don't understand the accents or the language. There was some other block happening.
Which brings me to the question I've been living for a few years now. In Buddhism, we believe that everyone has their own perception of reality. The circumstances and experiences that I've had lead me to perceive the world and my interactions in a certain way. And each individual's reality is created by this accumulation of experiences. There's not one reality that is the 'real' one. Because there's not one universal accumulation of experiences had by everyone.
My friend Ellen and I often talk about 'shared reality' - where one person's reality comes up against another. Not just a person - we see it happening with the protests around the country, in everyday relationships, in families. In the best scenario, we find the common ground between each of our realities and we make the 'shared reality' work. In the worst scenario, we see only our own reality and refuse to accept the legitimacy of another's.
This is where the ego (fear) comes in. When our reality is affirmed by those around us, we feel secure and safe. We express ourselves freely and feel confident that our actions and expressions are valid because the shared reality mirrors them in some way. When our reality is different from those around us, we can feel threatened and insecure, afraid to act and express ourselves for fear of having our reality negated or rejected by the shared reality.
There are two extreme ways of interacting within the shared reality - to push our individual reality on others or to reject our own reality and try to blend in with the external reality. My personal habit is to reject my own reality and kind of coast within the shared reality, keeping my own expression to myself. Yet when something is very important to me, I reach a point where I must express myself.
This happened recently with the protests. My political feelings were mirrored by the occupy wall street movement and I felt moved to go beyond my comfortable actions - petition signing, writing to congress representives and senators - and join marches and carry signs. This was kinda traumatic for me. It felt almost vulgar to be expressing my political opinion so publicly. It felt like the other extreme - forcing my individual reality on the shared reality. But I had reached a point, long ago actually, where I felt like I could no longer be silent in my feelings about certain practices in our government. At that point, the fear of feeling rejected by the shared reality was less urgent than my conviction about my own belief. As the protests became more combative across the country, I wondered where the middle ground was in this situation.
In Paris, I've been pushed to express myself in the shared reality from a different emotion. Not dissatisfaction with the shared environment, but rather a feeling of resonance with it. Since my first trip there, I've wanted to dig deeper and find out what it is about Paris that feels so comfortable to me. I've wanted to express myself and be part of the environment, no longer content to be an idle spectator. Yet I find myself with a different struggle. A language barrier that goes beyond irregular verbs and the correct placement of pronouns in a sentence. I find that when faced with an opportunity to interact with Paris, through individuals or a situation, I fall back on the trusty old 'Je ne parle pas francais.'
I understand a bit and I could actually express myself if I felt I had time, but in the pressure of the moment I find myself unclear on the shared reality and also a bit unclear on my individual reality. And in these moments it's easy to lose the feeling of resonance -to feel instead the confusion and fear of being an outsider.
What I realized during this trip, is that I don't ever say 'I do speak a little french, but I'm having trouble understanding. Could you speak more slowly please?'. I go straight to 'I have no idea what the hell is going on.' The middle ground in the shared reality is when one person expresses their reality and is open to the expressions of others, recognizing that both are valid and that one doesn't have to take over the whole space. In the middle ground, there are differences and similarities. We can choose to focus on all the similarities or focus on all the differences. Or we can try to figure out how our reality works within the shared reality and let it change and grow as a result of that interaction. And let the shared reality change and grow as a result of our unique expression.
For some people it's tough to acknowledge the validity of another's reality, for some it's more difficult to accept the validity of their own. But for a true interaction to happen, a significant 'shared' reality - more than one reality has to be present.
From a Buddhist perspective, compassion once again is a crucial element. We have to be compassionate to our reality - that we have a right to feel the way we do, and to express ourselves. And we have to be compassionate to others and their right to feel the way they do and express themselves. And beyond this specific use of compassion is the underlying lesson - that the similarities between us all are greater, deeper and stronger than the differences. That we are all connected through our very existence and any fear that arises, any imbalance of the shared reality, is the work of ego.
It's interesting the strength that compassion can offer, the groundedness. When we are rooted in our connection to our environment, to others - it becomes much simpler to express our individual reality and to accept the differing realities of others.
I'm sure I'll be living this question for some time. Hopefully the next time I'm in Paris I'll make some progress in moving toward the answer.
