The hard middle path
Recently my partner and I were both feeling emotional. The stresses of living in the world had weighed down upon us, and we’d both got upset for our own reasons. I shared some of my feelings with my partner. It was too much for him. I’d made the wrong call and overloaded him when he needed time and space.
I was sad to have over-burdened my partner. To avoid causing him more pain, I proposed a moratorium on me talking about these feelings.
We reflected, and realized that a blanket-ban on discussions wasn’t going to work either. It was too rigid, it couldn’t accommodate the daily complexities of our ever changing needs and desires. What is unhelpful in one moment could be intimacy in another.
The answer was I had to take the hard middle path: Not hide all my feelings, but not share them all either. I need to look in each situation and feel what is right in that situation: Feel what is compassionate towards others, compassionate to myself, what I need, what they need.
And seeing that answer, I realize it’s come up many times when trying to work out how to conduct myself.
Our relationship’s brought many new activities to my life. For example, going to dance parties together. My experiences of these have been mixed: from sublime joy to discomfort and loneliness. I’ve tried the gamut of approaches: I tried always going to them. Never going to them. And once again, the middle path turned out to be the right one.
The middle path is so much harder. There’s no automatic rule. It requires you to gauge each situation, with its complexity, and drill down to an answer specific to it. It requires you to understand the world in more detail. It requires learning new rules. It means you cannot fall back on “what you did before” or what feels familiar and comfortable, as those may be stories and interaction cycles you get trapped in.
This doesn’t mean you will always have this much thought-work to do. Habits and patterns will hopefully emerge.
Another example where this has come up in my life is around making major relationship committments. It’s something that will take a lot of time and tenderness to figure out the answer to. It’s tempting to try to boil the situation down to black and white: You want it or your don’t. It will happen or it won’t. There is either a plan or no plan. I wait or I don’t. These simplifications feel soothing, they provide answers and structure. But when you really consider them, they are ridiculously tortured logic, and completely lacking in compassion for some or all parties. The harder, grayer path of going down the middle, of being patient and thoughtful, must be done.
Talking more ethically and spiritually, I think this process of realizing when you’re tending towards black-and-white thinking, and trying to see the middle path, and trying to live it, may be a valuable process for building more consciousness and self-awareness. Sort of like filling in the detail in a line drawing.
It’s also here we can draw a little line back to the psychological background of these terms: Our subconscious mind runs many automations and heuristics for us, allowing us to live complicated lives in a challenging world. It tends towards simplifications, routine and stereotypes. To write new rules, we need to reason and act with our conscious mind. Eventually our subconscious learns from our conscious actions.
The stories we tell ourselves, and the sequences of thoughts that run our days, are also relatively automatic machines. With effort we can slowly re-shape them.
A final note, I think there’s a place for concrete, discrete, black-and-white thinking in our lives as well. Giving ourselves certainties, letting ourselves be off-guard, is important. If something works and isn’t causing undue harm, then that’s great. It’d be hard to manage any team or project without embracing some simplifications and assumptions about how the world works. And if one of those is giving trouble (like so often seems to happen in our now global-scale technology companies), then that simplification can be opened up and refined.
