Security Needs

"What would happen", my mother once winkingly asked me, ramming my backside with her vacuum, "if an irresistible force met an immovable object? Move your butt!". I was ten at the time, sprawled in her path over the comic page and under vacuum cleaner attack. I grumped, yielded the floor, and she vacuumed through. But from the second I hoisted myself out of her way onto the couch, the comics were forgotten. I was a young Einstein at work. "An irresistible force,” I pondered,… “an immovable object?… why, they'd just grind each other to a standstill! But no!… an irresistible force can't be stopped. Yet the object would refuse to budge. But...but.. aarrgghh! It's impossible! SOMETHING'S GOT TO GIVE!!"nnI’m sure Einstein would have agreed. Something’s always got to give. In the grand ecology of the cosmos, when matter is acted upon by energy, it ultimately yields to the energies that acted upon it. And it is this very yielding - exactly proportionate to the impinging energies - that preserves the substance of our dynamic universe through endless cycles of decay and rebirth. Nothing created. Nothing destroyed. But everything continuously in transformation. Inevitable, inexorable, "rotational decay" is simply business as usual in the world as we know it.nnI was a good bit older than ten before I actually came to understand this. I was older still when I realized that it accounted for all the goings-on in my personal world, as well. I discovered, for instance, that human relationships are not ordained to last any longer than a nickel-cadmium battery - except that they, too, sometimes can be recharged when they go flat. I found that people's personal commitments and priorities tend to shift in one direction or another over time, regardless of the agreements I might have had with them. It didn’t seem fair somehow… till I took a good look at the half life of some of my own commitments. Oy vey! I’m one of them!nnRenewable at best, each of the enterprises of humankind has its beginning, its middle and its end. Subject as they are to the winds of whim and fancy, even our fondest life projects and noblest institutions are candidates for revision or dissolution. Marriages... businesses... governments... societies... even whole civilizations can go belly up over time. And most of them eventually do.nnHow, in such a world, is one to have any sense of security at all!? The very question is a trap for the unwary. Listen to the premise implicit within it.nn"I can only feel secure, whole and well in a stably predictable world… or one in which I can, at least, be sure that I will always have __________ and will always be able to __________.nn“Security needs”… things we think we must have or do to be comfortable in our own skins… a corollary of the belief that we are only conditionally “okay”… an outlook acquired and sadly validated in most achievement oriented societies.nnOf course, most of us would rather be able to have and do as we please, at any moment, than not be able to have and do as we please. But is there really something or someone we must forever possess, or anything in particular we must always be able to do, or even once have done, in order to feel whole, well and secure? If so, our personal programming is not yet quite in order for living comfortably and happily among humankind on this ever-changing planet.n