I don’t know why, but I was thinking about the Stockholm syndrome recently. How the word syndrome is already so hard and judgmental and problematizes that which it tries to describe far too much. How it hurts me and gives me bruises inside. How all kinds of labels do that and how outrageous that is, that overly rational, divisive thinking. The truth, or what feels truer to me, is that it’s all blurred and that the lines we draw just aren’t real. You can take them, stretch and bend and move them, you can play with them. You can take any subject and treat it as a coin with two sides, clearly defined, where the coin lies on either one side or the other. Heads or tails. This or that. Period. No more discussion. File closed. Subject killed. Or you can take the coin, put it on its edge and let it spin. Then it turns into a ball that has no points, no sides, no edges. It simply rolls while being everything ...
The so-called Stockholm syndrome was invented as a psychological phenomenon after an incident where victims sympathized with their hostage-takers. Maybe they even fell in love with them, which says it perfectly: The unconditionality of love graciously took them in. Now you could call that wrong or problematic and pity those people, and yes, on a certain level, in a very dualistic sense, it “is” so. Life can pretend so. But you, it, life as you, could also see the beauty in that, the gentleness and the saneness; the saneness and the sameness. You just have to go an inch deeper or wider, it’s just a little shift. Then these are people who don’t fight what’s happening, who surrender. They surrender to the goodness of the life that everyone and everything is, and this is what (dis)solves the situation. And maybe (and not even that is necessary) they see the isness in it, the beauty, the dance that dances itself, just like that, in that guise, in that moment in time. You could call it love.
These thoughts, which have not even really been thought but more like sensed (only now, while trying to write them down, literally, taking them “down” into the realm of thoughts and words), have been with me for a couple of days and maybe, I don’t know how it all connects, have led to the moment in time this morning where I felt deeply in love with the greyness and heaviness that has been with me for quite a while, having me in its grip, having taken me hostage if you will. There was no resistance, so it was completely alright and beautiful as it is. And in that, life did its magical, paradoxical thing, and the greyness kind of disappeared. The problematicness of it vanished, it transformed into “beyondness.” The “place” where there is no need to accept or reject anything revealed itself, in its very innocent, obvious way. You could call that home.