Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.
Robert Frost’s Mending Wall features his neighbor, who twice suggests “Good fences make good neighbors.” I understand, as best as I am able, the utility of boundaries. My lawn and my neighbor’s are adjacent, no marker, no barbed wire, simply contiguous. Sometimes he mows some of mine, sometimes I his. I suppose I could take a marker and perhaps put a tiny dot on each blade of ‘my grass.’
Because something there is that does love a wall. Our minds.
Border walls, castle walls, Britain’s ‘wooden walls’ (the Royal Navy), drawbridges, traditions, rules, protocols, status quo, thou shalt not, because I said so, ours is not to reason why, don’t question authority. Whew, my fingers are tiring, and I suspect I have only just begun. Walls defend. If I see myself as with you, whoever you are, I need no wall.
The Disorder of Certainty
It is so alluring, yet so empty, to give up our agency, to surrender efficacy for the cinder blocks of surety. None of that pesky thinking, discarding the skeptic in trade for the cynic. The twittishness of talking points. We’re all familiar with terms like ‘eating disorder’ and ‘attention deficit disorder’ and such. What if we started being less cavalier about what we might label certainty disorder?
Certainty Disorder: (noun) The mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual result of mistaking ambiguity for threat; espousing, both internally or externally, fear-based dogma that is inelastic and whose primary symptom is the dilution, either gradual or immediate, of native curiosity.
“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know … What I was walling in or walling out”
Becoming part of a movement, a religion, a community, a focus group, or a team, feels like inclusion. Each of us wants to be unique and part-of at the same time. Simultaneously outstanding and alike. Leader and follower. That tension powers, in the extreme, narcissism and groupthink. Most of us live in between.
Maybe a loving question to ask about our beliefs, our following, is about how much of our attachment feeds separation. Does my belonging exclude questioning (walling in)? In my heart and mind, are those who live within or toward another belief faulty (walling out)?
The myopia we generate—to feel most closely ensconced in our group—feels powerful at the same time that it abrogates our responsibility to seek justice and love rather than judgment and indifference. I only need to inflate my sense of efficacy if I’m unwilling to exercise it. If I can’t trust other people to find their way, maybe it’s simply an extension of my distrust in myself to entertain possibility.
Alan Watt
