assumptions

For the past 10 years, I’ve been living life at an altitude and speed much too unsafe for a simple man such as me. Sometimes a severe mercy brings us down, down to the ground, the ground of our being. As I hit the ground (in sooo many ways) over the past year, I’ve begun to “see”. I began to see the assumptions I had been living my life by. We all have mental models or basic assumptions about life that taints our opinions, values, beliefs, and actions. Often they are invisible to us. As invisible as the water is to the fish. They are too close to see.

Just as a racist sees nothing more than normal,

just as a terrorist sees nothing more than faith,

just as an abusive parent sees nothing more than discipline,

just as a gossip sees nothing more than being cool,

just as a rude and abrasive person does not see the violence they perpetrate,

just as a parent that yells at their child cannot see the violence they perpetrate and perpetuate;

. . . in the same way, I had been flying along without seeing the assumptions that drove my life. It takes a lifetime of commitment to begin to see through the façade, to see the façade itself, and to begin to just see.

One of the assumptions I had been living by is the assumption of scarcity. What I mean by this is that I had been silently worrying about my basic needs. I had been clinging so tightly to being married, to owning a home, to being employed . . . to the Almighty Paycheck. To me, these were basic needs. They shaped the values, the non-negotiables in my life. And I knew, way down deep, way beneath words, and even beneath consciousness, I knew that if I lost these things . . . I would die. I literally would not survive emotionally, spiritually, or physically.

The marriage I sacrificed everything to maintain, to hold strong to through sickness and health, riches and poverty . . . separation . . . divorce . . . gone.

As a result of the divorce, the home I thought I would retire and die in . . . foreclosed . . . gone.

The job I had taken 10 years, through education, sacrifice, and added responsibilities, in developing a career I loved . . . through funding cuts . . . gone.

I truly believed that I needed financial security to survive life.

I felt so deeply that I needed to know when that next check was coming in to survive.

The stress and worry of wondering how I would support my kids was eating away at me.

I had joined the human race, I had hit the ground, I had crashed, with nowhere else to turn. I was prostrate on the ground of being, the common ground that is shared with all humans, where all pretenses were gone. Where all I could do was fall into the hands of God.

It was there that I open my eyes to see . . . that I was still alive . . . and loved.

It was there that I began to “see” one of the invisible, subconscious assumptions I had lived my life by: SCARCITY.

“Most people seem to assume that scarcity is a simple fact of life. How else can one explain the obsession with acquiring, consuming, and hoarding which permeates our society? We live in constant fear of the future—the fear that money will run out, that food supplies will dwindle, that housing will be unavailable. And as we act on those fears, the assumption becomes reality! As we consume more than we need, as we hoard against the future, then stores do dwindle and prices do rise and there will be too little to go around.

“The tragic victims of this self-fulfilling prophecy are, of course, the ‘have-nots’ of this world who lack the capital to act out their economic fears. For them, scarcity is no assumption at all: It is a hard and cruel fact of life. But that fact is created by people who have a choice—the choice to assume scarcity and grab for all one can get, or the choice to assume abundance and to live in such a way as to create and share it. For these people, for those of us who are affluent and educated—the matter of choosing assumptions is more than academic. Our souls and the lives of others hang in the balance.” (Parker Palmer, The Promise of Paradise, pp. 94-95)

“Do not keep striving for what you are to eat and what you are to drink, and do not keep worrying. For it is the nations of the world that strive after all these things, and your Father knows that you need them.” Luke 12:29-30