The Zebra is the Lens

I’ve discovered something remarkable about Zebras. 

Yes, aside from the fact that they make an annual migration of 1,800 miles - among the longest of any land animal.

Zebras are an excellent metaphor for reality…black and white stripes…anyone?

Okay let me explain myself. 

So I’m walking down the street, a couple of blocks from my house, listening on my iPod to Richard Rohr talk about having a non-dual view of the world. Most of us start out life thinking of things in binary terms: good vs bad, success vs failure, right vs wrong, us vs them, and so on. This tendency towards duality, or seeing things just in black or white is a problem. As we mature spiritually we began to appreciate that seeing things in black and white, just doesn’t really capture reality very well. Or at least, seeing the world through a lens of either/or isn’t a helpful or healthy way of thinking.  Non-dualistic thinking, in which we consider reality in “yes/and” ways, seems to make us more able to live inside the paradoxes and tensions of spiritual truth.

Now when I say something like, “50 shades of grey” it conjures up an entirely different set of meanings for a lot of people. But this greyness of the world, in a whole wide range of shades, is how I’ve been thinking for a while; at least since my old black and white ways of thinking about things kind of came apart at the seems a few years ago. Seeing things as grey, is both a badge of honour and a great problem for those of us who think of ourselves as progressive. Lots of us think that seeing things as grey is a sign of our progress, while our more conservative brothers and sisters see it as our fundamental weakness. Greyness, especially when it comes to moral ambiguity can be really great when it comes to being inclusive and accepting, but it does make holding convictions rather difficult. (Other than the conviction that everyone who doesn’t see things as greyish as you do is hopelessly backward and intolerant) 

Being open and loving others just seems like an easier thing to do inside of a framework of grey. But what about those times when loving people involves calling them out on their brokenness and mistakes? Problem: if everything is grey how and where do we hold ourselves or others to standards? What often ends up happening amongst us more left leaning folks is that we become inconsistent with our use of a “greyer” perspective. Admittedly, I can be pretty arbitrary about when I see the world as grey; choosing to do so when it suits me/lets me off the hook (like when it comes to saving for retirement by owning stocks in multinational corporations who do terrible things) and then switching back to black and white as a matter of convenience (like when other people do things I think are terrible, especially certain politicians).

So as I’m walking and listening to Father Rohr, I pass by a local bar which has it’s patio open and folks enjoying one of the first warm nights this frozen Canada has seen in a while. Now this particular bar has somewhat of a reputation, for a lot of things, but not least of which is the heavy presence of cougars. Not the large cats you might find in a jungle - I mean the other kind of cougars. And of course one of the staples in a cougar’s wardrobe is none other than zebra print. So I’m listening to my esteemed padre talk about how Jesus is constantly deconstructing the dualistic thinking of his day and replacing it with non-dualistic ideas. Even the idea of being both fully divine and fully human is a non-dualistic concept of who Jesus is. And out of the corner of my eye, at about 50 paces in the distance, I see a cougar wearing a zebra skin mini skirt, with matching heels.

Instead of appreciating this fine display of fashion prowess, my mind went a different direction. 

From a distance, zebras look kind of greyish. But as everyone knows, that grey is just a product of black and white merging as the distance of the object exceeds the acuity of your cornea. They have black and white stripes nonetheless, and what matters is the angle and distance and lighting that affects your perception. Apparently even insects have trouble with perceiving zebras, and it’s believed that one of the benefits of their stripes is that biting insects can’t make sense of the contrasts. 

The truth is: there is good and evil. There is light and dark. Not everything is morally ambiguous. Conservatives and liberals, you can both be right sometimes and even at the same time! (Ha! See what I did there? Non-dualistic thinking about the age old conservative vs liberal dichotomy) Things can be both black and white, and also grey at the same time, depending on your perspective and the viewing context.

Freedom of speech - a good a thing isn’t it? Well, for someone who has lived under oppression and not been allowed to speak their conscience freely it might seem like a black and white issue. But for some of us who have long taken for granted this freedom and witnessed it’s abuses in the form of hate crimes and the music of Michael Bolton, it seems rather more greyish. Then which is it?

Yes…and. It’s all of the above. It’s grey and black and white. 

It’s a zebra. 

Ethnic groups? Zebras

Religions? Zebras.

Governments? Zebras.

The internet and electronic media? Zebras.

The New York Yankees? Not zebras - just evil, and ruining baseball

(Actually, they too are zebras, and now that I recall that they wear pinstripes, I can never look at them with the same malice again….)

It depends on your level of analysis, your context, and it depends on what else you’ve been looking at.

I realize that my desire to sort the world into black and white is a vast misjudgement of how things really are so often. People are never all good or all bad. Individuals as a whole are always grey. Even some of the most infamous perpetrators of evil have been known to be capable of great love and kindness towards others. Our minds kind of blow up a little because we can’t compute or categorize a person who engages in genocide during the day but goes home and loves their family. We have such difficulty with the idea that they have stripes of good and evil in them….how even we have stripes of dark and light in us. We need a lens, a metaphorical construct to be able to hold in our minds the reality of any given person’s black and white and grey qualities - all at the same time. 

Zebras, you are magnificent. Not just to middle age single females for whom your skins provide fashion accessories in the search to attract a mate. But in your fine hides you effortlessly capture this beautiful essence of human reality: black and white, and grey, all at the same time. The Zebra is the lens. It gives us the metaphor for understanding that much of what we see is grey, likely because the vision of the human mind and heart is so limited. But viewed from a different perspective there are black and white realities where true good and evil live in the same lowly beast. 

Poverty of Excess Part 1 - The Good Life

Marla came to my practice recently, complaining of depression and anxiety that she simply could not explain. 

“My life is good!”, she reported. “I have everything a person could want. A good marriage. A home. A job. Financial security. Good health. Two well adjusted children. Annual family vacations….”

In her list, which follows the quintessential middle class North American script for living a “good” life, Marla was relaying to me that she had ticked all the boxes but still found life wanting. Even more impressively she had thus far escaped any significant tragedies that would wound or scar her life. 

So now, plagued by fears and sadness she could not explain, sleepless nights, difficulty leaving the house, and an abiding sense that she was headed towards losing her mind, Marla found herself overwhelmed, yet struggling to feel as if any of her suffering was legitimate.

 I’ve changed her name, but really, it could be any number of male of female patients from a variety of age groups and walks of life, that present for consultation with some similar version of a very similar set of problems. All of them in this particular boat describe themselves as unable to see why they should be suffering in this way without any sufficient reason to provide them with valid justification for needing attention from specialists. And it is precisely because of this apparently illegitimacy of their suffering that they struggle to be open with other people about their mounting psychological impairment. Most of them watch the news and observe the suffering taking place in other parts of the world, and wonder what it is that they have to be so sad about or afraid of. 

It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that when symptoms emerge, it’s a sign that there’s something wrong with our selves. But sometimes environments can be the source of dis-ease…not every problem is internal in its origin. It can be tempting to blame biology and overlook the role our culture has in creating illness. In fact, I think there’s some financial interests pretty deeply invested in having us believe that chemical imbalances are all the explanation we need for mental illness. There’s an entire economy at stake in helping us avoid the confrontation with this question: “what if the ‘good life’ as it’s been presented to us, isn’t so ‘good’ after all?”

Is it possible that this overabundance is actually creating problems within us? Could it be that we still lack something even in the midst of all this wealth?

There is, another kind of poverty. It’s the poverty of excess. It’s a poverty that exists in the midst of the kind overabundance so common to many people in the developed world. With so many resources it’s very difficult to regard our lives as deprived of anything. But the poverty of excess is not one we can solve by simply acquiring more of something because it is our acquisition driven lifestyles that are actually creating the poverty in the first place.

As I noted in my post, “First World Problems”, it can sometimes feel invalid to complain about the kind of suffering experienced by those who live in the top 10% of world incomes (which is most people in North America). But ignoring the spiritual illness brought on by individualism, consumerism, and following the middle class “script” may actually perpetuate the behaviors that we engage in that result in the oppression of the developing world.

In the midst of our poverty of excess, it can be difficult to put our finger on exactly what we lack, because we appear to have so much, too much even. So what does a poverty of excess look like?

I realize this is too large a topic to cover in one blog post. But I want to start first by drawing our attention to the mere existence of the poverty of excess or overabundance. 

It’s been said that if you want to know what water is like, don’t ask a fish. It’s hard to see the poverty we swim in in our culture. Traveling and living elsewhere can help so greatly with this - like swimming in a different pond for a while to gain perspective on your natural habitat. For the longer you’re immersed, the more difficult it can be to describe what it is you’re immersed in. 

People like Marla are sometimes unaware that there even is a culture they’re immersed in, let alone begin to know how to describe it.  I’m not sure that I do either. But let’s try. Let’s begin by recognizing that in the water of our culture there are messages like, “you can never have enough or be enough”. Let’s start to open our minds to the counter-intuitive reality that excess, or overabundance doesn’t create a sense of sufficiency, but actually creates anxiety about deprivation and a vague sense of needing more. 

Maybe we can even learn to recognize how some of our emotional struggles emerge in a context where comfort and security are presented as normative, and suffering is regarded as a failure to live up to the culturally ordained plan for the good life.