Do we need a new word for ‘boundaries’?
Our neighbours put in a pool last summer. Right up against our shared fenceline. Down came the old wooden palings embedded with perfumed jasmine, and up went a grey metal monolith à la 2001 A Space Odyssey. My response may have resembled the monkeys’ in the film.
That majestic jasmine was one of the reasons I loved our house, and despite best efforts, it was ripped apart beyond rescue.
In inner city suburban life, fences don’t seem to be getting any smaller. As I stroll around our semi-boujee Unley hood, more and more new homes rise up encased in imposing, dare I say prison-grade, concrete privacy.
And this is why I’m worried about the word ‘boundaries’.
My fear, dear friends, is that in our important pursuit for self preservation, we are erecting impenetrable divides between ourselves and others.
Boundaries are basically the new black. The plural noun literally means, “to bind’, or ‘to constrain”. Its linguistic tone is stiff and cold and I am suss on its origins as a patriarchal construct. It feels fixed, firm, definitive, as if convincing us to be constantly on the defence, to hoard and hide our lives behind ever harder lines. The word sounds like a warning, but the thing is, I do not wish to be ‘bound’.
If we constantly co-exist within a context of threat, of course we’ll feel the need to spend more of our heart-budget on weapons of mass separation.
Now let’s be clear. I am an avid supporter of self care and healthy energy management. I’ve spent 20 years (and fat wads on therapy) dealing with crippling people-pleasing tendencies. I know first hand that martyrdom is a trapdoor to burnout, and preach relentless self-compassion, on the reg, to anyone who will listen.
It’s just that the language we choose is critical - it creates our shared reality. Words build a context and we live into that agreed upon meaning we’ve constructed for ourselves.
As people get more burnt out, and fences get higher, we see a parallel pandemic of loneliness in our society. Could it be that in a frenzy to protect our all-hailed individualism, we are forgetting all the ways we need one another to survive?
Humans are inherently inter-dependent creatures. Our most fundamental need for safety relies on connection. Ever since emerging from the womb, you and I have survived on love. First from our parents, then peers, then partners
Even though we may play out our attachment styles differently, none of us ever unlearnt that desperate, and necessary, need to be loved.
On the bigger scale, taking care of kinship systems is a lost art. Look at the growing emotional distance between extended family members in nursing homes, or neighbours who don’t know eachother’s names, or socio-cultural communities with ‘nothing’ in common, or sentient beings that we let die without blinking an eye.
‘Othering’ is a toxic lie that has led us to unlearn how to care about the web of lives that surrounds and sustains us.
So I’m wondering, what if we tried on some different words for ‘boundaries’ instead?
Take ‘honesty’, for example.
Give it a sniff. Swish it around. Notice how it feels different to defending? It’s got nothing to hide, totally genuine. It has overtones of clarity and strength, but there’s a softness to it.
Honesty means being acutely truthful of our feelings and needs with each other, but not necessarily taking a defensive stance. Not putting up a bigger fence.
(Side note. We’re talking about your average, safe relationships here. For anyone experiencing genuine danger, by all means erect barbed wire and run.)
Of course, ‘speaking your truth’ is also hot right now.
The caveat on this one is remembering that ‘truth’ is a moving target; a relative concept dependent on the culture / belief systems / racial group / gender norms / social identity you were born into. The neighbourhood I grew up in may have different ideas of right and wrong to yours.
‘Truth’ is a rainbow smoothie of dependent conditions and contexts.
Which is why it is most urgent that we combine our truth-telling with kindness. Our honesty with community care.
The tricky thing about relative truths, is that they muddy up the ethical frameworks we need to co-exist peacefully together. We end up with personal freedoms (eg. the right to bear arms) getting prioritised over basic human safety.
Maybe it’s no mistake that many ancient wisdom traditions place non-harming at the coalface of their moral codes. Translated into today-speak, I like to think of ‘ahimsa’ (non-harming) as showing respect to others, while respecting myself at the same time. I find this helps balance the pendulum of narcissism and martyrdom into a more healthy central zone.
If we interpret boundaries to ‘honesty with care’, they can no longer be used as a justification to perpetuate our systemic, fear-based narrative of division.
Ram Dass summed it up well when he said, “love everybody, and tell the truth”.
Being human is a messy business. But I say we’re better off leaning into the reality of our inherent inter-connectedness, than trying to psychologically ‘bind’ or ‘constrain’ ourselves from eachother.
Loneliness is a painful, deeply ingrained illusion fuelled by the violence of separation.
The antidote is allowing ourselves to willingly roll in the muck of genuine human relationships.
The one we have with ourselves too.
I planted a new Jasmine bush in front of our garden's grey monolith this spring. Its translucent baby tendrils climb shyly up wire webbing we laid against the cold metal. It started blooming for the first time last week. The sweet neighbours have said repeatedly how sorry they are, and invited us to use the pool anytime.
I listen to their young children splash and shout in sodden rapture as I work from home on the holidays. The sound makes me smile, as I’m forced to remember all the ways that we belong to each other.
Since we will all need to continue navigating this scary and sublime time on earth together as best we can, may we seek language that serves to dismantle the fences around our hearts. Or at least grow flowers around them.
