The places between people and peoples: difficult and fascinating places.

They’re places of tension and complex culture, equally promising the worst and the best of what it is to be Human.

Here we find hope in vulnerability: a dance played out between people and peoples who inhabit a diversity of borderlands.

It is a dance because vulnerability requires mutuality if it is to be a positive experience.

It’s not me telling you everything about me and you not telling me anything about you.

When vulnerability is the dance of two people or peoples, mutually responding and initiating – depending on where the dance is going – the prize is worth it:

‘The result of this mutually respectful vulnerability is increased connection, trust, and engagement.’*

We might even go further than suggesting we dance with one another, to a perichoretic** exploration of dancing in one another: we enter into the stories and lives of others, allowing for something greater to emerge.

Here’s an interesting question from my friend Alex McManus: we know stories elicit cortisol and oxytocin – enabling us to feel empathy and focus – so, what if we could take these chemicals, knowing we’d become more connected and empathic as people – would we?

Of course, if stories produce these drugs, then, when we come together, our endeavours would be helped by creating a story together, one we believe in, and engage and commit to.

When vulnerability is expressed in the borderlands between people and peoples, we learn to move forward as a Human species, it is how we negotiate the chaos and randomness we find in the spaces in-between spaces.

And vulnerability, because it has to be mutual, brings grace with it.  Grace offered to one another so we can become all we each can become: holons and fractals.

(*From Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly.)
(**Meaning an intersection or interpenetration of lives: oneness.  Christians used this to explore how God might be three and one.)