I love spiders. This one seemed to be suspended in mid-air. If your eyesight is good, you might be able to see her web.
I’ve just returned from a five-day road trip all the way up through France and into the North of England. Thankfully there wasn’t much traffic, but there were those inevitable stretches of roadworks where everything slows down as three lanes go into two… and those infuriating drivers who, rather than considerately changing lane as soon as reasonably possible, speed along the disappearing lane and force themselves in at the very last opportunity.
As we were driving along the Paris ring road (a half-hour detour, due to over-reliance on Google maps), I pondered the fact that although traffic is comprised of many different vehicles, it behaves like an entire organism. Each individual car is impacted by the rest – someone brakes suddenly in heavy traffic, and the ripple effect causes cars further back to come to a complete standstill.
This made me think of the Internal Family Systems Model approach to psychotherapy. This sees the mind as being comprised of multiple parts, each with a distinct subpersonality. Let me introduce you to some of mine: Judge Judy, Busy Beryl, and Anxious Audrey. Each of these subpersonalities means well, but they aren’t always helpful and can sometimes be downright counterproductive. The aim is to get to a point where, rather than resenting or struggling with parts of yourself, you can see them for what they are and bring the mind back into balance.
Back to the Paris ring road. When a car committed the aforementioned sin of racing ahead and pushing in, for a brief moment I could see it as a broken, wounded part of the whole traffic, with which I also identified, and rather than get angry with it, I felt compassion. Yes, the driver was behaving badly, but there could be all manner of reasons for why they had developed this behaviour as a coping strategy for life.
This sense of being part of a larger whole also made me think of Paul’s writing in 1 Corinthians 12:12-27 about the concept of the body of Christ. Despite the culture we swim in emphasizing our individuality and personal agency, in many ways we are profoundly connected to each other. What a difference it would make to our world if we could all recognise this!