From Serviceberries to Reimagining Security
One of the silver linings of this pandemic is that when my “normal” life got put on hold, I was invited to ask questions that I wouldn’t otherwise ask…
I have been intentionally exploring my relationship to money since the beginning of the pandemic. The question of How much is enough? often comes to the foreground. How much do I need now? Shall I save for my son’s college tuition? How much money do I have to have when my aging parents need intensive care sometime down the road? You never know when…
Over time, I have noticed this question of “enough,” has evolved. It isn’t just about money. This question rests on my own sense of security. The more pertinent question might be: What do I need to feel safe/adequate? Deep down, my sense of security seems to be largely dependent on the need to predict and control the future. In the quest for such control-based security, I may never have enough money to prevent disasters from happening to myself and my loved ones. What I do have instead is a lurking anxiety about potential risks and scarcity that may happen sometime in the future:
How many hoops does one need to jump through in order to feel safe and adequate in today’s world?!
This question has been hiding in the background of my life for the first 30 plus years: On the surface, my middle-class life seems very well “under control;” Deep down, anxiety about safety and scarcity in various dimensions (financial, physical, psychological, environmental, etc) has always been there, only rearing its head during moments of panic.
Numerous panic attacks and depressive episodes in my early 30’s “forced” me to search for healing beneath the surface. I have learned to turn inward through contemplative practices. In my early 40’s, I have finally started to face the underlying anxiety and my relationship to safety head-on. No more “hoops” to jump through. Can I find safety in a different way? I started to search for alternative answers…
Last year, my dear friend and collaborator Brandon Dube brought to my attention an essay written by a plant ecologist named Robin Wall Kimmerer. The essay is titled The Serviceberries: An Economy of Abundance. It re-connected me with a world that seemed familiar and yet quite different from the social world around me: serviceberries and the ecosystem around them. The bees, trees, berries, and soil… They can just be themselves and they are already in service to each other. They don’t have to be calculative in their exchanges like we do in our social systems. When the tree offers berries to the birds, it doesn’t ask the bird to pay it back right away or promise to do anything in return. The tree can simply be itself and contribute its natural gifts to others. All parties are held and supported by serving each other in the ecosystem. Such services are often not in direct reciprocity. Rather, it often goes around in circles: the trees provide for the berries, which provide for birds, which help spread seeds, which become trees…
If we shift our focus from nature to our social systems, how much energy might it save us if we don’t need to be calculative when we exchange values with others? For instance, what if I can simply focus on contributing my natural strengths and serving others–not needing to waste energy on worrying or demanding others to pay me back right away? Instead, I can learn to embody a sense of security in circular reciprocity loops similar to those in nature. If I help friends and strangers in need today; I’ll most likely be helped, one way or another, by friends or strangers, when I’m in need tomorrow. If help doesn’t arrive in time, it can be used as an opportunity to cultivate my capacity to adapt and to be resilient. Such a sense of security is not predicated upon maximizing control of the future. Instead, it allows me to deeply relax, release my anxiety about the future, and use the extra energy boost to focus on how I can tap into my potential RIGHT NOW. I am trading my illusion of control for the freedom to be me and to amplify my natural strengths, right now.
When I help others without strings attached or expecting payback in return, the quality of our relationship is different from the quality of relationships in the commercial, transactional world today. The mindset of quid pro quo may give us a sense of control and safety on the surface. But it drags us all down into a rat race that depletes our mental energy slowly but surely. The rat race in which everyone is anxious about controlling the future, manipulating or being manipulated by others. Where everyone feels disconnected from each other. In which no one is spared. Not even the super rich and powerful.
So how might we re-imagine and cultivate a sense of security that frees us from our anxiety about the future? Instead, how might we nurture authentic human connections that lift all of us out of the rat race? To contrast this conventional sense of security based on controlling the future, let’s name the alternative sense of security present-focused security or serviceberry security (As far as I know the serviceberries never seem to worry about their future).
Fortunately, I’m not alone in seeking ways to enact serviceberry security in myself and my social circles. Wonderful minds, hands, and hearts have been exploring and experimenting from a myriad of angles: from economics, political science, to spirituality… From gift ecology, time banking, anti-capitalistic models, solidarity economy, to wisdom from indigenous civilizations…
I don’t know what destinations our ongoing explorations will lead us to. But I have four intuitions about possible paths we can embark on to re-imagine and re-enact a more liberating sense of security, a serviceberry security, for ourselves and our society.
Intuition 1: No futuristic model or technology alone can provide an adequate solution. To think that there is a brilliant theoretical model out there that can design a perfect social security system with perfect technologies for us is an illusion. While waiting for such an utopia to happen, we are being sucked into the rat race, deeper everyday.
Intuition 2: The answers are already here within us, beneath us, and around us, if we are open to receive them. In other words, we have everything we need right here. We each have to embark on our own inner journey to explore our unique relationship to security. No one else can accomplish the journey for us. No one can rush us into any forced-upon destination. I dare to believe that we already have the keys to unlock our past puzzles, traumas, and to re-examine old stories about security (or lack thereof). We may not be ready to let light inside us and around us from different angles. But the cracks are already in us.
Intuition 3: Our individual journeys can be greatly enhanced by nourishing connections with others. For those of us who yearn to re-imagine our sense of security, we may want to huddle together and share our knowledge, experience, humor, dance, play, and our whole selves. Each of us holds a unique piece to unlocking the collective puzzle. We can hold a mirror for each other to reflect light onto our blind spots, dark and forgotten corners in our psyche.
Intuition 4: However our journeys may turn out, we will probably never get rid of our control-based sense of security and fully replace it with a sense of serviceberry security. It’s not an “either/or” battle between controlling the future and focusing on the present. If control-based security is about our ability to predict and optimize for the future, then serviceberry security is about cultivating our individual and collective capacity to adapt and be resilient regardless of changes in the future. We need a healthy balance of both capacities. It’s up to each individual and community to experiment with what a healthy balance looks like for them. Both the individual and the collective need to figure out for themselves how to come back to balance when patterns are entrenched or no longer serve us.
I don’t know where these four intuitions may lead me. At this point because my mind has been so entrenched by control-based habits, I deliberately don’t want to know where I may end up in my journey. It has been strangely freeing and refreshing in the last few years. What I have noticed over time is that there is a growing voice in me that says “I’ll be okay, no matter where I land.” Interestingly, what “landing somewhere” means has also been shifting for me in surprising ways. So far, asking this scary question of “How much is enough?” has led me to so many delightful encounters, new skills, insightful discoveries, deep healing, and authentic connections within me and around me. I don’t want to go back to my old “normal” life again…
