Lately I’ve been thinking about how we’re all trapped.

As a human rights activist, I love a bad guy - someone, something to focus energy on, to attack and dismantle. And there are plenty of bad guys out there, don’t get me wrong. But there are also plenty of confused people trapped in systems designed to dehumanize them.

As it relates to work, the systems and mindsets that underpin the Aid Industrial Complex trap us all. Neocolonialism locks us in power dynamics that inhibit genuine partnership. Capitalism limits our definition of success to endless consumption and a cancerous structural dependency economic growth. Binary thinking limits our creativity - as individuals and as a society - erasing the nuance and subtlety of being human. Patriarchy represses women, but it also socializes men into roles that restrict their access to the range of human emotion, limiting their capacity for connection.

Oddly, acknowledging that we’re all trapped unlocks in me a little window of compassion.

We’re all in this sad, lonely mess. Not necessarily together, I wouldn’t go that far - some people are living in safer, warmer altogether more pleasant cages than others - but we’re caught on the wheel at the same time.

We’re all going through it, one way or the other. Suffocating under the weight of these systems.

And, as often happens when I’m chewing on an idea, I end up reading something that clarifies the thought while also reassuring me I’m not the only one thinking it. I’ll be turning it over in my own head and then almost magically the universe sends me something to read that clarifies the thought in my own head.

How fitting that this time it came from both a United Nations report and Nigerian allegorical fiction.

Says the UNDP,

Social norms that impair women’s rights are also detrimental to society more broadly, dampening the expansion of human development.

Says Ben Okri,

Man was not born in prison, but prison was born in man...The original prison was the original garden: we have cultivated our myth.

Your freedom is my freedom. My prison is also yours.

Strangely, all of this reminded me of a time I served as a volunteer during that 10-day silent meditation retreat I wrote about earlier this year. Because I was preparing and serving food to my fellow meditators, some of them took it as an opportunity to break the vow of silence by trying to communicate with me. At first I was judgmental of these people (who, I noticed, were usually the same ones taking more than their share of food or not showing up for group meditation sessions). My Type A, good student ego got angry and tight, resentful of their unwillingness (or inability) to abide by the rules.

And then I remembered that I was simply there to make and serve food. To contribute to the conditions that could allow these people to benefit from vipassana. I wasn’t a prison guard. It wasn’t my job to police anyone. The people I was witnessing act out were suffering, their inability to be still a symptom of something. Realizing this brought a flush of love for them. A sense of solidarity and a quiet wish for them to be well. I found myself cheering them on silently in my head, so proud when these people I had never met or spoken with actually did manage to settle in. Their perseverance and “success” felt like my own.

Bear with me here, but I think some part of that applies here.

Remembering we’re all trapped helps me resist demonizing people (a little bit, anyway). Not demonizing makes me remember they’re human beings, flawed and complex and confused. Like me. Like you.

It helps, that extra millimeter of compassion and kindness. When I can remember, I take it with me as I go about my day.

It also helps me think more clearly about how to change, or create, the conditions - the systems and structures - that allow us to all thrive.