🤜🤛
Sharing can be powerful, as we all know. Our society, workplace, family, and friend-groups are all based on the concept of sharing. Sharing of feelings, thoughts, actions, and goals.
The most powerful forms of sharing, where we are able to give ourselves completely to others, and accept them completely, feeling and acting in unison, can lead to especially rich and fulfilling outcomes for everyone involved.
Of course - sharing is difficult, and fiendishly so.
Consider the example of a conversation. How do we actually know someone has heard and understood what we've said? How do we know that we are interpreting their response the way they want us to? How many questions and responses does it take for meaning to be completely changed from what was intended?
Sharing can also be dangerous, as some of us would have experienced. Giving part of yourself to someone else always comes with the risk that this part of you can be used by the other person in ways that are harmful to you.
Because sharing is difficult and carries a risk, most sharing happens within a structure, which allows people to share (😉) a common understanding about certain things before they start talking, including a general sense of the 'responsibility' of each party towards safeguarding what has been shared.
As an example, we can think of a dictionary, or the laws of a nation, or the 'bro/sis-code' or the house-rules that some of us may be familiar with.
For someone aware of dangers of sharing, a sense of security and comfort is essential before they even consider sharing with another person, (or trickier still) groups. This feeling of safety is itself based on a form of sharing and trust, and as I'm sure many of us know, is usually hard-fought, and always feels great ♥️
Equally fundamental is the need for a shared language/system that allows each being some certainty that what is being said is also being understood in a somewhat consistent manner by the other people involved.
It feels now, like we have hit upon some sort of circularity; to be able to share, we need to be able to share a sense of trust and a common base for communication.
Over time, we have come to handle this problem through the use of structure - We are, in the course of our lives, onboarded onto several structures (family, community, religion, state, friendship, organizational norms) and these 'social contracts' are what ensure that we are able to work and build together - through ensuring a common understanding of various aspects of the world.
The problem with this is that structure always adds rigidity to a system - making it solid, but also limited to certain paths and possibilities. People who speak more than one language know that there are certain ideas and sayings that don't translate well from one language to another.
Given that each of us ARE dealing with multiple languages (one for each rule-system - religion, country, organization, etc.) here, the entanglement between these structures also causes translation gaps between contexts (balancing priorities between work and friends and family) that we deal with.
There is however, at least one more method that we use to solve this problem 🌜- friendship.
All friendships start from a space of very low knowledge of and trust in the other, but over time, and with more interactions, grows a connection, and a shared understanding of things (inside jokes and memories 🙂) that enables sharing - and a freer form than can be allowed by structure.
This then appears to be a useful approach to this circular problem - repetition, or iterations.
Each turn around the circle is different (!) and adds to the understanding of the space being explored, and it is the process of looping that allows for us to see newer 'exploration paths' at each step.
The trick then, is to find systems with the following features: