I’m a new grandfather. In the past year our daughter and our
son have each had their first children come into the world. For this, I will be
eternally grateful. Being allowed to witness in these small children a view of
humanity’s common experience with awakening, emerging, and letting go I am a
student in awe.
I never understood swaddling – the binding up of a newborn
to the point where they can’t move and are held firmly in check. Oh, I
understood the clinical reasoning for swaddling an infant. But I never fully
appreciated how comforting swaddling is to the newborn’s nervous system. And I
definitely never appreciated how the need for it never truly leaves us as we
move into the world. In an earlier posting I quoted the Danish philosopher Søren
Kierkegaard as having written that “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” Watch
a newborn’s anxiety increase as he or she dizzily waves their arms and kicks
their legs unconstrained by the familiar confines of the womb and you’ll know exactly
what this is about. Having a way to contain myself provides me a sense of
comfort that comes with knowing my boundaries. We start small and, if we’re
diligent, we learn to expand the boundaries that comfortably contain us – our
swaddle – to take up more space, to have more impact, to be more. If we are
unfamiliar with our boundaries, if we haven’t mindfully expanded them we are
like that small infant only our dizzy thrashings cause us and those around us far
more distress.
When we grow we test and expand and change our boundaries.
This is a natural state that needs to be consciously attended to by adults. The
world – our world – is a world of immense possibility. How much of the world
does my “container” allow me to have access to? This is a great way to think
about keeping my ideals in motion. It’s not that the world isn’t coming to
my door. The world is at my door and what I need to do is build a boundary – what we
call a containment field – that can include not exclude what I want to have and
how I want to be. In a very real sense, what limits me isn’t who I think I
am…it’s who I think I’m not. What limits me is the size of the containment
field I’ve constructed to meet the world. My containment fields, my many and
varied boundaries, are where I begin, not where I end. They are the doorway through which my ideals access the world.