Re-cultivating Our Mutual Selves
The great Texas freeze last February, (a.k.a. Snowmageddon), was pretty darn traumatic.
Living without electricity or heat in subfreezing temperatures for several days was hard enough on us humans. But once the snow melted and revealed the withered foliage of my yard, I feared the worst had happened—that while I may have survived the freeze, my plants and trees had not. They looked utterly wiped out, with no indication that they’d ever come back. Nevertheless, I decided to trust the advice of Guillermo, our gardening expert. I resisted the urge to pull up and chop down, to pull and prod. Instead, we trimmed, replanted, fertilized, watered, and re-cultivated the garden.
A shishito pepper I grew in my garden after the freeze.
Patience is a virtue
Guillermo, an immigrant from Mexico, knows a thing or two about resilience. “Just wait”, he says. “Things change. They get better”.
Now, scarcely six months later, everything is thriving once again. And dare I say, even bigger and grander than before. With the help of Guillermo and his team, we are cultivating a garden full of life, where after that brutal February storm, there was none.
We lived through this freeze, and the subsequent rebirth of our garden at the exact same time we were living through the pandemic. Like the freeze, Covid-19 decimated my sense of community. I spent each day mostly alone, with the exception of my wife and little dog, and the various talking heads on my Zoom calls. I forced myself to isolate myself from others to protect against the spread of the virus. In doing so, I was also forced to isolate myself from what I am calling my "mutual self".
A cactus I found on a walk, growing out of the bits of itself that died during the freeze.
The mutual self
What is our mutual self? It is that part of our being that lives and breathes as a shared community. To our mutual self, there is no me, or them...only us. While our individual selves live in private, our mutual selves live in public.
However, aside from the individual self, there is one other (very real) aspect of our beings that must be nurtured—the universal self (or as I sometimes refer to it, the third self).
Think of these three selves, not as a linear progression of our being, but rather overlapping identities, each spilling onto, and into the other, and shifting positions constantly. Another way of looking at them is as primary colors of dye in a glass of clear water, mixing together, and then separating, only to mix again in different amounts, making new colors altogether.
We are the glass of clear water, and our various selves—individual, mutual, and universal—are the colors of our lives.
An imbalance in the (life)force
Because of our recent isolation, we have become imbalanced. Our individual sense of self has taken on unusual primacy. I am not advocating "collectivism". (In fact, I’m more of an individualist than a collectivist. Perhaps I am what others would call a "typical American".) However, the behavior I am witnessing around me, sometimes described as "individualism", is not typically American.
I remember a time, not so long ago when most of us consistently put friends, community, and country ahead of our individual perspectives. When our grandfather's generation was asked to enlist for the World Wars, the military could not process their applications fast enough. When the Peace Corps was formed two generations ago, millions of Americans signed up to travel around the world, for little pay, helping people they had never met, in places they had scarcely heard of. These people shared the mutual assumption that all of mankind was connected and that if you could help, you did.
I could give you dozens of other examples, from midwestern barn raising to the sudden and miraculous appearance of the "Cajun Navy"—a fleet of small fishing boats, kayaks, and the like, which saved hundreds of lives during Hurricane Harvey by rescuing folks who had been stranded on their roofs by the rapidly rising waters of the storm. Most of these examples were of people who did not have to be asked to help. But America was also a country where when you were asked, you answered. Our mutual selves were just as muscular as our individual selves, and the two spheres did overlap.
Now it seems our two selves are imbalanced—like a weightlifter with a massive upper body and chicken legs. We exercise our individualism constantly, but the part of us which is shared, mutual, community, sits on the couch eating potato chips and yelling at the television. How did this happen? That's the subject of an entirely different (and a much longer) essay. My point today, is that the isolation of Covid exacerbated it even more.
Dare I say, our mutual selves need a workout. We need to cultivate our mutual selves back into shape! It’s as if all three components of our complete self have been confined to house arrest. This is usually considered a punishment. We need to move outside of our confinement and, as the kids say, “touch grass”.
The first light is the brightest
Our mutual self is nurtured by shared experiences. My wife and I just attended our first in-person college football game recently. At first, my individual self protested. Too many people, too much noise, what if someone around me has Covid? Why are all of these people screaming? Looking back on my initial (mostly negative) reactions, it was strange because after all, we’ve attended and enjoyed these games for decades. But we had been under self-imposed house arrest for the last 18 months, and the first light of freedom can often seem the harshest, the most blinding, the brightest. Nevertheless, as the game went on, our mutual selves reacquainted our individual selves with the joy of this shared experience. Best of all, our team won.
Another way I nurture my mutual self? Practicing my faith in a place of worship. Of course, I can pray alone, and still find it to be a source of light for my sun-deprived spirit. However, attending a service brings me a different kind of spiritual energy. Jesus spoke directly to this energy when he said, “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them”, (Matthew 18-20). Jesus was speaking directly to the need and benefit of cultivating our mutual selves.
Voting in person on election day has always been a special celebration of my mutual self. There is something about going to the polling place, standing in line with many of my neighbors—some strangers and some friends; but all of them there of their own volition, to express their views on how our communities (and our nation) could form a more perfect union. This feels sacred to me. My mutual self finds majesty in the shared experience of participating in social responsibility. While it is true that we often, or perhaps even mostly, cast our individual votes in a way that reflects our individual self-interests, I wonder how a few of our votes might change if we considered them from the viewpoint of our mutual self? If we do not cultivate and recognize that part of our being, might we risk losing the ability to hear the voice of our mutual self? Let’s not let our mutual self voice be drowned out by the voice of our individual self.
The beauty of a shared sovereignty
Why is it even beneficial to cultivate our mutual selves? After all, each human being is an individual, with, as our declaration of independence says, inalienable rights. Put simply, we have the right, and indeed, the obligation, to be who we are. History is replete with examples of attempts to take that away from us. However, there are benefits to sharing our sovereignty. Some of the most powerful forces in the universe emanate from the shared, and cannot be recognized by only one of the three selves. Love and friendship, charity, humor, goodwill—all of these and more live and breathe within the sphere of our mutual self. However, they are deeply stunted when one lives mostly within the individual.
The most stunted form of our individual self? Easy. It’s narcissism. The narcissist is not only unaware of the needs and desires of others but is also completely unaware of the existence of their mutual self. It’s quick to feel attacked and slow to feel empathy. One of the most powerful reasons to re-cultivate our mutual self is to weed out any form of narcissistic self—of ego—as the mutual and the narcissist are incompatible.
All three spheres need each other, crave each other, and when balanced and in harmony with one another, function for the better of all mankind.
We were stuck inside. Now we are freer to move about. So, I propose this: let’s get outside, breathe some fresh air, feel the sun on our skin, hear the voices of our friends and neighbors, dance to the music together, sing our songs in harmony with each other’s voices. These things are not abstract concepts that live only within the words of poets and the dissertations of graduate students, but rather, they’re the essentials of life and happiness. My mutual self knows how to do these things better now, and knows how it feels to go without. So, go ahead, individual self—hand your mutual the keys. Let 'em drive for a while. It will be fun!