Safety’s False Hope
A Willingness For Risk in Containment
We want something, we just never know what. Designers make money when they can figure out what that is before other people realize it for themselves. For the most part, people really don’t figure it out for themselves. However we will trick ourselves into the illusion of knowing it precisely. There was a day in my life when all that I wanted was to make one thing work. And I gave up the well being of many areas, in the whole of my life, for that one single part.
Safety is a weird story that we tell ourselves, and it is usually predicated on the idea that there is a separate and sacred core of value in life, which is protectable from the rest of our experience. We erect inner chambers, holy of holies, fortified citadels, we employ containment to ensure separation, and we place our idols of fulfillment inside.
But time never stops adding up. What once seemed spectacular with fresh eyes, will fade into my background, and eventually grow stale. No one stays the same. What goes up must come down. Change is a thing you can count on.1 But anything vital has a living changeable force within it, whether it’s biological or metabiological: You can watch the same movie every year for the rest of your life, and if it’s a vital story you will find a new gleam in it each time. In adolescence it will tell you about the importance of spontaneity while later in life it will tell you about the importance of discipline.
“It is the object of this Oneness in us to realize its infinity by perfect union”
-Tagore, Creative Unity
When we safeguard an image of our idols, by separating them from their being in the world, we break the infinite interconnection of that oneness. They are no longer vital and gleaming, we deny their changeability to calcify the image, to cast the idol; they become flat and lose all force of vitality. Maybe we will hold on too tight to a person; prescribe how they must be. Maybe we will try to tame a story; reduce its meaning to a message. Maybe we will reckon the value of our future; script it unnaturally.
There is a magic in containment and it has little to do with safety. A caged bird withers, separate from its self, because what it is, is a continuity with the forest; a part of the season-cycled rhythm of life and ecology in which birds may have their own development and evolution. Likewise, what we seek to keep safe through the same means we smother; and so our attempt to secure its safety is more dangerous than letting it remain open to risk. It is the weirdest thing: sometimes mere faith is what keeps water from slipping through our fingers.
Faith knows that you can’t have it your way. But sometimes what you need might find you, because you would let it. In these moments we can see that the magic of containment is not about ensuring something remains untouched, but actually what containment does is transform: With the advent of pottery we can let vegetables turn to vinegar. With the advent of city walls we do much more than keep intruders out.
Anything worth protecting will always belong to oneness.
Miley Cyrus, Younger Now.
This is touching on a lot of things that have been rolling around in my mind that I've been thinking of writing about.
I feel that this is part of what's coming out front right now. We are seeing the distortions caused by our beliefs about safety and especially as tied to identity. A static sense of self as a protected idol. The weaponization of safety narratives in every arena, social, geopolitical...I'm seeing this as part of the toxifying idealism being laid bare during Pluto in Aquarius.
Our desire to contain and defend is always a primary leverage point. Thinking with containment as part of flow is important. Reduction of volume rather than total restriction. "Let me borrow this," instead of "I have this."
Interestingly, that dumps right into the concept of stored wealth. The idea of keeping money as a fermentation process. Just another pot full of cabbage. It's not wrong to store it, but you can let it go too far and rot.