“If we don’t figure out how we’re going to live together, then we’re going to die alone"
- Jack from the television show “Lost”
For far too much of my professional life I operated under the delusion that I work best when I am working alone. I rejected the notion of co-facilitation. I didn’t want to plan with others because, frankly, I thought that they would get in the way of the material that I knew I wanted to teach, and the methods by which I knew I wanted to teach it. Teaching and facilitating by myself meant that I didn’t have to worry about anyone keeping up with me. It meant that I didn’t have to take the time to explain all of the intricate details that made up the very well thought out strategy behind my pedagogy. And it meant that I could center my own vision for the kind of experience I wanted my participants to have.
The funny thing about this delusion is that even when I was completely subsumed by it, I didn’t really believe it. I knew somewhere, not even that far down into the core of my being, that I did not, in fact, want to be working alone. Even inside of this delusion, I knew and could articulate that my greatest professional longing was for people to do the work with. I was living in a bizarre duality where the more competent I became at solo facilitation, the more isolated I felt, and when I did find myself working on teams, I noticed that I was not bringing my whole self to the table. I didn’t like feeling isolated and I didn’t like not bringing my full self. I didn’t want to give up being driven by my vision and I didn’t want to give up my desire to share the responsibility of leading with others.
Eventually and by accident - or at least by the alignment of forces beyond what my concious mind could intentionally create - I found myself involved in a project that upended the paradigm through which I had been experiencing this tension. I found myself involved in a project that had a vision that did not come from any one person on our team. At first we each thought that the vision came from someone else until we realized that the project did not originate with any of us, it had an origin of its own, a vision of its own. It was a true calling and our orientation to it was that of stewards.
We each arrived to the project clear that we were there to bring whichever parts of us the project needed, that we could each show up in our fullness, in the fullness of our sovereign selves, and that we were there to hold the project together.
It was a wonderfully powerful experience that broke the delusion that I wanted to do any facilitation on my own ever again. It also broke the delusion that told me that to be in community I would have to give up my own agency, my own autonomy. It opened up an entirely new paradigm for me that saw the ideas of autonomy and belonging not as oppositional but as mutually essential to each other's fulfillment.
The drive to assert one's autonomy and the desire for community are presented to us in the mainstream education system and through popular media as a binary set of human motivators. You can have “Communism” or you can have “Capitalism”. You can obtain value and worth through moral deeds and personal sacrifice for others, or you can have your value and worth be tied to your individual achievements. You can care about the wellbeing of others or you can care only about yourself. You can be a team player or you can be a leader.
In the hyper-individualistic society of the United States, this constructed binary shows up in the way that we valorize notions of independence and put down notions of dependence. Independence is the declaration upon which the entire story of this country is told. A dependent, in our tax code, refers to someone who is yet unable to support themselves financially. Independence is coded with notions of strength and dependence with notions of weakness.
But any of us who have taken the time to look at the world as it actually is know that this is a false binary, know that it is a constructed binary. We can see that our need for autonomy and our need for belonging cannot be fulfilled when pitted against each other, and cannot be reduced to an independence / dependence binary. The idea of interdependence reminds us that we are individuals with unique gifts and talents who are also social beings that require collective action to reach our fullest potential.
So, what does interdependence look like? It looks like sovereign beings moving in coordinated action. It looks like choosing to rely on each other, not because we have to but because we want to. It looks like asking for help even when I don’t need it. It looks like knowing I can do something by myself but choosing not to because I remember that doing it together will be more fulfilling and will make it better. Interdependence looks like making sure that I am centered in myself so that I can show up to my community without having to center myself.