Evan Renaerts

Boundaries and Borders

November 12, 2007

Late yesterday afternoon the wind began to rise, howling out of the southwest, blowing heavy rain and the last of the leaves before it. This morning the rain abates and the dark gray cloud mass is torn open to reveal blue skies again.

My little family and I headed into the United States this past weekend to help celebrate a friend’s fiftieth birthday, a simple two and a half-hour drive to Seattle. The sky was clear and the traffic light until we reached “the world’s longest undefended border,” where everything stopped and was held up for ninety minutes of security checking. The experience on returning to Canada the following day was exactly the same in reverse.

All of this defending of borders and boundaries got me thinking. When we start out in life we have no clear sense of being “separate” or differentiated; the world is us and we are the world. Little by little we learn to make distinctions between something we come to identify as “I” and something we identify as “other.”

This process is deemed to be psychologically essential, the development of a sound ego and a good sense of self. It’s easy enough to see the value of individual boundaries; they create the space within which we can try out ideas and concepts and they give us the room we need to draw some conclusions about who we think we are.

When the creation of boundaries goes too far in an individual or a state we begin to see a movement away from expansion and generation toward contraction and degeneration. The entity (whatever it is) stops being open and permeable, becomes resistant to new or even “different” perspectives. Too strong a boundary begins to engender fear of the “other.”

Excessive fear has never been identified as a factor in rational behaviour – fear leads to bad judgement and bad decisions, as ever more options and possible choices are eliminated. When fear is allowed free reign a point is ultimately reached where even that which had previously been seen as a part of the “I” is now seen as other and a threat.

In ancient cultures such as India there exists an understanding that a sound sense of self is needed for a person to fully enter into life, to take risks, to interact with others, and even to create community. It is further understood that once a person is established in the world they must then begin to let go of that separate identity.

Perhaps the whole purpose of a well developed ego is to bring one to the place where they are strong enough to begin letting go of the notion of separateness and begin a conscious journey back into unity. The real strength comes with a realization that there is nothing that requires defending (why defend what cannot be destroyed) and nothing to defend it from.
I don’t expect most people or any governments to agree with this perspective and until faced with a direct threat of annihilation there’s no way to be a hundred percent certain that I can live by this knowledge. Something we all can do though, is challenge the fears we feel rather than have them run our lives.

When the cure for fear is to defend yourself to the point where all that’s left is you and your fear, then this truly is a case of the cure being worse than the disease.

Evan Renaerts
604 314 0835
evan@evanrenaerts.com