Welcome to Boundaries
Boundaries are the places where differences meet.
Boundaries are evolutionary engines, driving the abundance of minds, bodies, beings and biomes that grace the earth. Each month, I’ll choose a new boundary to highlight through different styles of writing and other creative offerings. If you like philosophy, psychology, the scientific method or creative arts (i.e. do you like thinking and feeling?), I’ll explore them widely. But true to form, I’ll try to resist the pseudo-intellectual itch of unifying them all into A Big Idea (though how marketable that can be!). Whether it’s a big-and-scary life/death boundary or a warm-and-cozy inside/outside boundary, the only unifying principle is division™️ (just kidding).
While I’ll spare you the postmodern gobbledygook (except when it’s especially tasty), the notion that all truth is bounded, whether by language or mental states, shouldn’t inevitably lead to the post-truth political spin that pervades so much social media and punditry. If all truths are bounded, then boundaries are the membranes that allow truth to persist. Boundaries protect. They keep things alive. We’d be prudent to heed them, while learning to differentiate healthy boundaries from their shoddy substitutes.
Our sense of “healthy boundaries” is often reduced to limits, barriers and walls—metaphors of militaristic defense, the feeblest form of protection. Truly healthy boundaries are not built like barricades, nor swiftly decreed by law and limit-setting. Whether we look at personal boundaries like identity, intimacy and labor, or planetary boundaries like land use and greenhouse gas accumulation, healthy boundaries dependably sustain thriving communities within and beyond their borders. They contain multitudes. You—your mental, physical and social functioning—contain multitudes. A wizened mentor in the mental health field, upon asking him for some parting wisdom before I began a project on psychedelic therapy, cautioned me that the idea of a “unitary self or ego, a master conductor or controller rather than a multiplicity of selves, is one of the most misguided ideas in psychology.” We each have multiple personalities, and this is not a disorder. We can be whole only when we engage the boundaries within and around us.
Boundaries do more than demarcate a perimeter. Boundaries help create environments by distributing energy and resources within a space. Health (human and other) is predicated on the maintenance of boundaries that are neither porous and poorly-defined, nor rigid and restrictive. The porridge must be just right: there is a Goldilocks zone for every living system and its component parts. Habitable planets in the universe must be at the right distance from a star to have liquid water and harbor organic life. Animals function within a habitable range of heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, pH, temperature and hormone levels that put this organic life force in motion. This Goldilocks principle is less about brittle set-points than flexible—dare we say playful—positions that allow for resilience in the midst of change. Beyond astronomy and physiology, each thought, emotion and relationship has a workable range, where it can live and evolve responsively, just as species are distributed across a geographic range according to their species’ abilities and needs.
The adage “there are no straight lines in nature” doesn’t go far enough. There are no lines whatsoever in nature, just boundaries and their associated forms. Lines are the language of blueprints, schematics and closed systems. While lines have helped us re-present reality (and fantasy) since the first charcoal drawings went up on rock walls, there is no first-order life in them. The language of life is written in boundaries. Living bodies are endlessly-enfolded organic origami with boundaries at every curve and discontinuity: genetic nuclei exchange material with each cell’s cytoplasm, which is ringed by membranes that maintain electrochemical gradients with blood and extracellular fluids; cells collaborate as tissues, which sync up as organ systems, which form bodies and minds, which create and experiment with boundaries between people, places, ideas, and events. Modern public health and epigenetic science show the reverse is also true: these layers flow in reverse as well, with differences in the distribution of pollution, contagion, stress, political power and social connectedness writing themselves into the body and brain, weaving their way down into our threadlike chromosomes. This all emanates from a simple formula: the only way for life to multiply is to divide.
Reaching without Breaching our Boundaries
The past year of pandemic and political struggle has highlighted how poor boundaries can become when the devices in most people’s pockets can reach into the present moment uninvited, flooding us with decontextualized information and outright disinformation.
2020 helped train our collective sights on boundaries. The coronavirus refamiliarizes us with the intimate linkages amongst our bodies that create a biological grid of health and disease; the subsequent disavowal of masks and social distancing by a sizable portion of the U.S. population shows that healthy, necessary boundaries on behavior are quickly cast as infringements on personal and economic freedom; the siege and storming of the U.S. Capitol mirrors this boundless entitlement by groups leveraging white privilege to try to overrun a seat of government and overturn an electoral victory that was won by meticulous organizing efforts in Black-populated cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta and Milwaukee; the eleventh-hour decision by Facebook and Twitter to ban Donald Trump reminds us of the unconstrained power that tech giants have to bracket and steer our country’s civil discourse; lastly, manipulative calls for “unity” continue a long tradition of papering over political divisions and polarization when the chips actually fall toward the will of a diverse and democratic electorate.
Boundaries are real whether we choose to acknowledge and cultivate them, or reflexively brand them as restrictions on a delusional dream of boundlessness.
When I was younger, fascinated by physics and cosmology, I yearned for a “theory of everything,” wanted to find the golden ticket that explained it all. There were plenty of spiritual tastemakers ready to make me one with everything, mixing science, faith, psychology and social criticism into a frothy latte of ready-made enlightenment—light on expertise, heavy on appropriation. What a rush. The world I wanted to live in was boundless, the possibilities limitless. I paid little attention to how the boundless abstraction and endless growth of our political economy were a farce. I studied international economic development in college, sensitive to some of its failings but believing its arc generally bent towards justice. It was a strange formulation of social justice, as it placed little emphasis on social bonds, and even less on boundaries. Instead, I wanted everyone to join me on this side of privilege, where the educational adage that you can do and be anything was drilled into me until there wasn’t any place to anchor me to the bedrock of history and a lifeline of ancestors, families and communities.
I was floating in a most peculiar way. The emotional highs and lows of life, whether they sung or stung, were equally unconnected and untethered from my flesh-and-breath experience. Neither helped me lay the root structure for lasting meaning and presence in my life’s story. The aspiration for boundlessness finally broke down during my twenty-something passage through a particularly American form of prolonged adolescence, most of which was spent in medical training and public health school.
It is only a sign of how far out I floated that something amiss in the atmosphere was the first thing to alert me to the existential risks of our current state of affairs; it’s not a sign of wisdom, but of whiteness, that the lesson that bankrupted my trust in the status quo power structures was global warming. The least deep of the root causes of our rapidly destabilizing environments—burning forests, sweltering cities, failing croplands—is the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the air. And yet it is a starting point, a limit past which people who might otherwise stay complicit in a world that has seemingly worked for them begin to learn to hold sacred ground and insist “No, you shall not pass!” Below that limit, there is a liminal space, full of invitations to fully consent to the pleasurable and painful meanings of life, whispering, singing, laughing, clapping, weeping, embracing, grieving, dancing with a sense of yes.
The Invitation
I still believe in notions of unity and solidarity, but the imperial psychology of unification has been forced into a long retreat by the forces of liberation that cry out even in a body like mine, whose protection and promotion is tied to the oppression of so many. When shame, panic or paralysis overtake my senses, I pivot to the other type of retreat, the reflective kind, where words become refuge. I write to protect myself by removing my usual defenses. I write to create boundaries between the world and me. These boundaries do not separate me from the world, but invite me into it, beautifully disabused of my certainty.
Division is only a problem when we are looking to unify all things as one, the conceit of every emperor, faux-guru and monopolist. But even these despots know they must divide first, then conquer, unify and consolidate power. To bemoan divisiveness and polarization, and simply call for people to come together, overlooks the basic process that creates power. Your phone is powered by a battery that divides chemical reactions and directs electricity through the positive and negative poles of an electric circuit. Photosynthesis directs the energy of sunlight across a membrane that divides chemical reactions and sequences the passage of energy from a photon to charged molecules to energy-dense sugars. A solar panel grid works by a semi-analogous process. Decisions within groups also require a tipping point of polarization, in which energy finally flows towards action. To heal our divides, we must uphold them, draw energy from them. When the body is cut open, it heals by reconstituting the violated boundaries of skin, vessels and organs. Our body politic cannot heal without abundant boundary formation. A house divided does not fall if it’s built from democratically-responsive layers of power that provide the checks, balances, consequences and coalitions of an effective pluralism: it stands stronger than any cavernous stadium of bipartisan battle royal.
In the search for better, more abundant boundaries, I hope to divide and bind, invite and inspire. This newsletter and its associated website (www.alextrope.com) will be a place for holding space, creating tiny environments where all things strange and ordinary come to drink at the edge of wildly different realities.
So have a snack, pour a drink, and pull up a seat. Next month, the first offering will be on the theme of boundary/limit, exploring how we distinguish between our limits and boundaries to reckon with the fullest extent of dissent and consent. I promise that this will be more than an homage to the proverbial powers of Yes and No that self-help eulogizes. We’ll look beyond individuals to the communities and coalitions that actually invest dissent and consent with their truth and consequences .
Boundaries incoming!
~AT