Two Sides of the Same Coin — ReDo* || By Beth Hinnen, Certified Mindfulness and Meditation Teacher
*I first published a version of this blog during COVID.
During any trying time in my life, it drops in for me that adequacy and interdependency are two sides of the same coin. And during those days of COVID, I saw this coin being flipped in every moment, with one word or the other, each coming up about 50% of the time.
For adequacy, on a macro level, there was a lot of failing, from government to social structures to “what does the science say now?” However, on an individual level, what abounded on the internet was the ingenuity of people everywhere to take care of themselves, their families, their community. I loved the grandparents who plastic-wrapped themselves so they could hug their grandchildren; I marveled at the private 3-D printer owners who voluntarily made parts for face shields; I laughed at the Tik-Tok videos; sang the hand washing songs; and cried at the online concerts. The list goes on and on with hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions of examples of people turning to the thought, “well, what can I do given these new parameters?”
I project the human species didn’t survive and get to where it is today by sitting down with fire in a cave and calling it quits. I mean, fire in a cave must have felt yummy after no fire in a cave. The truth is, we humans are inventive, filled with creative energy, and we actually can’t stop ourselves from trying one more thing that might improve an experience (really, pour over coffee is the bomb, such an improvement over drip, French Press, and yes, espresso).
And yet, as many inventors find out, creating includes mistakes, wrong turns, back steps, riffing off past successes, which leads me to the definition of “adequacy.” What a relief to find it does not include “doing it perfectly, or originally.” Adequacy means, according to Merriam-Webster, “sufficient for the need,” “good enough,” “acceptable.” What I sense can happen for many people during trying times is that they are making the situation they are in acceptable, not perfect, not necessarily original, simply adequate. Again, back in COVID, we saw that with healthcare workers, essential service workers, people who had been laid off, and students graduating into a world of who knows what. It sorta sucked, it was sometimes not fun, and yet, they did it anyway.
Which leads to interdependency. Beyond being a “lone wolf,” the way many people experience adequacy is 1) they accept help, or 2) they ask for help. When we do the latter, we automatically understand we can not do anything alone (and asking the Universe for help is a very viable option). Again, during COVID I saw this starkly in my NextDoor app search for the latest sightings of toilet paper on store shelves. When that proved dicey, I found on Amazon an ebook to make my own toilet paper. Intrigued, I wondered if it would have me collect wood scraps, chip, boil, and mash them, and roll the paste between … something … to create a paper-ish substance that might work (turns out, it was reusable toilet paper made from t-shirts, yikes!).
When I found that unappealing, I flipped the coin and came up with interdependency (or adequacy, crap, either one is good here) and picked one morning as a “treasure hunt” and just drove store to store (finding places I never would have gone in before, real treasures!) looking for toilet paper, and lo, at the fifth one, scored some Charmin (I purchased my allotted 2 packages which is an entire other blog about self-worth, a “spiritual” mindset of not being greedy, yada, yada, yada). And it struck me … the Charmin didn’t magically appear on the shelf. Someone, somewhere cut down a tree. Someone drove it to a processing plant. Someone pushed some buttons on some huge machines that did what I was going to do in my bathtub. And these folks relied on the plastic people to supply the clear wrap. Then someone delivered it to the store where I bought it. Oh, and the checkout person, masked, gloved, and behind a plastic window, sold it to me.
The more I heard from people about their experience during those COVID years, the more I saw how the little linings of silver appeared — the sparks of ingenuity, the new space of time to attend to passions, or simply cleaning the house; the new-found love for family members they can’t see (how many of us thought absence was a blessing and found out we didn’t like that either?!) Many people discovered they were stronger, more capable and wholly adequate. And even those who had a desperate, despairing, miserable time, I propose, they too are still adequate to it because … they made it through.
We can’t have one without the other. Our interdependence works because we each are adequate. And we are most adequate because we are wholly interdependent. With everything going on in the world today, now is a good time to bring out that coin, and start flipping it again.
About the Author: Beth Hinnen came to the spiritual path from the corporate world. After experiencing impermanence and greed, she left to study Yoga and has over 1,000 hours in Yoga teacher training, and ended up specializing in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, spiritual scripture that closely aligns with Buddhism. From there, she studied Zen Buddhism for over ten years, including in-person, month-long monastic retreats, until she earned certification, in January, 2023, as a Mindfulness and Meditation Teacher with Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach. Currently, Beth is a co-leader of the IMCD Council, and on the Teachers Collective, as administrator. She hosts a Meetup group called Yoga Meets Buddhism, and for the past three years, has held an online Dharma Wednesdays class that discusses the Yoga Sutras while also bringing in Buddhist teachings, along with Sufi poets, Christianity, Judaism and other spiritual paths that reinforce the words of Sri Swami Satchidananda, the founder of Integral Yoga where Beth studied. “The truth is one, the paths are many.” More information about Beth is at www.samayaco.org.
