IT DEPENDS......

Some days I find myself caught in a mental web that feels impossible to climb through - how do I approach this challenge when it’s clear that every aspect is important, and changing one thing means giving up or changing another? Have you ever felt trapped in this type of mindset? Maybe you’ve had the seed of an idea to change jobs, for example, but every time your daydream about doing something different leads to thoughts like “but how would I pay my car insurance,” then I would lose all my seniority,” or “ my parents might see me as irresponsible.”

There is nothing in life that remains independent of everything else. Buddhists refer to this as Dependent Origination: no phenomena have an independent existence but are inseparable from what existed before them and along with them. There is much more to this concept than the simple definition I have shared here, but for our purposes let’s just say that nothing we experience, nothing we do or even say or think happens independent of everything else. Maybe this is why doing something, especially something different, can feel so overwhelming to us.

Some of us might remember the Mouse Trap game from our childhood. I remember it vividly! You would spend most of the game setting up the elaborate mouse trap maze composed of flimsy plastic parts, sometimes with springs or levers, according to the specifications on the board and THEN you could play the game, once it was all assembled. The thing was that if you jiggled the board or accidently grazed something with your hand while setting it up, you could activate the whole cycle, sending the little metal ball through the maze and deactivating that whole thing. Then you were back to setting things up again. I loved that game but I also got a nervous exhilaration from it, realizing that getting to the point of “playing the actual game” was dependent on so many things not happening “by accident.”

It’s human nature to want to get to a logical conclusion so that we can feel solid in our knowing. When my children we young, they would often ask me questions about how something works or what they should do in a particular situation. Often, to their frustration, my answer would be “it depends.” They would groan and exclaim ‘just tell me what to do!” While it’s just how my brain seems to work - one thing infinitely connects to another thing - I also know that by not supplying them with a quick answer, I was helping their brains create complex pathways that, yes, make decision-making more complex and less black and white, but ultimately helped them to develop into better citizens of the world.

There are no easy answers and we can’t just think about what’s best for us in the moment. As we face serious climate change realities, it is concepts like Dependent Origination that are our path to “saving ourselves” because by saving something of our planet and the plants and animals we share it with, we are saving our own futures - we, as humans, do not exist in a vacuum. Everything we do, every choice we make affects everything around us, just as all the choices made before our time are affecting us now.

It’s true that taking steps to slow down climate change is essential to the future of everyone and everything- it’s a big picture, global concern. However, the decisions that we make for ourselves as individuals are no less important. Self care, such as therapy, is not an “it would be nice” but an essential step we can take to care for the complex web in which we exist. But feeling more solid in our place in the complex web, we support the whole system. And there aren’t any easy answers, so therapy shouldn’t be about getting a prescription for what to do next in your life. Really, it depends on so many things. Perhaps the only “wrong” path is the one taken when we aren’t fully awake to our connectedness to everyone and everything around us. If there is a formula, it is that a right path (not the right path because there are many), takes us closer to connection and to a life more guided by an awareness that “it depends.”