M. Scott Peck, of The Road Less Traveled fame, liked to save everything is multiply determined, which sounds much cooler than “has multiple causes” but isn’t quite as clear, so I surrendered coolness for clarity. That may be the story of my life, but that’s another post.

I was in a room full of people gathered around a common purpose last summer. As they moved about I suddenly saw quite clearly that they were all responding to one another out of the dysfunction of their histories. I could only see that because I knew some of the people, but the insight was powerful. In effect, they weren’t responding to one another at all but rather to a great combination of people past and present, most of whom (and in some cases all of whom) weren’t physically present. There were, however, dozens of uninvited guests who were psychically present. 

It was as if everybody had been handed a script as they walked in the door. Since there weren’t enough copies of the same script for everybody, copies from three or four different plays had been randomly distributed. Nobody wanted to be rude, so nobody mentioned the different scrripts. They simply read their lines at what seemed to be the appropriate time, whether or not they made any sense. At the end of the night everyone went home confident that a great time was had by all – except, of course, for anyone who tried to make sense of it all. Those people were mostly silenced by the others who were afraid that the mystique would be broken and actual sharing might occur, opening the door to emotions and other messiness not generally encouraged in polite company.

As a result nobody was transformed, no one experienced growth, no connections were made, and those with some level of awareness noted that they left a room full of people feeling somehow more lonely. Getting to the bottom of such things required time and, most often, some assistance, so most people prefer to just put such things away in a closet in the basement of their live. They carefully padlock the door so nothing can escape, but as the contents of the closet sit unattended they grow. The roots of the issues become entangled and potbound, depleting the energy of their host, until one day they demand attention and refuse to be ignored.

Far better to open that closet now.