What is in a word? A lot, I think. Although a rose by any name may smell just as sweet, I find that when I frequently bump into and miswrite the same particular words, it may be alerting me to something. Dyslexia, possibly, but that is not my point.

There are two important words I regularly double-check, often enough to cause me to pursue their connection.

Attach and attack are so close as to be word-siblings. Perhaps the Cain and Abel of word siblings. The Edgar and Edmund of Shakespeare’s King Lear; characters whose connection is indicated by the close and common letters used to make up their names.

Attach and attack have so much in common, particularly in the field of divorce mediation — a field very much at the intersection of attach and attack, both of which imply an essential relationship between two entities.

At·tach verb

1. fasten; join.
   “he made certain that the trailer was securely attached to the van
2. attribute importance or value to.
   “he doesn’t attach too much importance to radical ideas”

At·tack /əˈtak/ – verb

1. take aggressive action against (a place or enemy forces) with weapons or armed force, typically in a battle or war.
   “in December, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor”

– noun

1. an aggressive and violent action against a person or place.
   “he was killed in an attack on a checkpoint”

In infancy, we live or die based on the quality of our first attachments. We are entirely at the mercy of those into whose care we are born. Human infants are among the most helpless of all species — and for the longest period of time. In the early months of life, if we are not adequately cared for, we perish. Our survival does not so much depend upon access to sustenance or shelter, but on the attachment to the other who secures these things for us. The quality of our early attachments to caregivers nourishes — or complicates — our development into more autonomous adults. Often it does both!

In very early attachment we literally are cannibals, nursing from our mother’s breast. We are nourishing from the very body of another person. Attachment not only has the highest stakes, there is an intensity of oneness, an innate hunger for the other that is bodily, preverbal — a knowing akin and inseparable from our very aliveness.

Regardless of how educated, well-traveled, or generally sophisticated our grown-up selves are, we are all elementally composed of attachment, our earliest experience of it being fierce, dependent, foundational.

Fast-forward to divorce — when attachment can transform into aggression, fury, panic, and attack.

And it can be one of the most regressed and vicious attacks that we see.

How strange and close these words are! Attach can encompass gripping for dear life; attack can mean fighting for one’s life. We have pointed out that the child’s version of both has this quality.

Much is required of us humans, navigating our design flaws and marvels, making self-compassion mandatory, withering the virtue of blame.

Even in adulthood, there is nothing casual about attachment. We take it quite seriously, invest in it with abandon, and feel threatened to the core if an attachment is imperiled. How murderously rageful we can become regarding our attachments! As we appreciate the primal nature of attachment, we can begin to respect the swift and stunning shift from attaching to attacking the object of our attachment. Linguistically, when word and concept provenance are so closely bound, we can recognize an almost Euripidean tragic inevitability, something predestined by the Fates rather than our personal failings. Much is required of us humans, navigating our design flaws and marvels, making self-compassion mandatory, withering the virtue of blame.

The relationship of attach and attack, their overlapping origin, points to the complexity, yearning and conflict inherent in being human and being together.

Alphabet Soup for The Relational Soul – Part 2

Like attach and attack, mediate and meditate are another pair of closely related words. The delighted expression of people first glimpsing my business card quickly transforms into something just shy of crestfallen when they grasp that mediate is for resolving conflict and dissolving marriages, rather than the peaceful, expanding consciousness promised in meditating. These words again are separated not even by a letter, but merely by letter placement.

Me·di·ate/ˈmēdēˌāt/ verb

1. to intervene between people in a dispute in order to bring about an agreement or reconciliation.
   “Wilson attempted to mediate between the powers to end the war.”
2. to help to settle a dispute or create agreement when there is conflict between two or more people or groups by acting as an intermediary or go-between for those parties.
3. to bring accord out of by action as an intermediary.

Med·i·tate /ˈmedəˌtāt/ verb

1. think deeply or focus one’s mind for a period of time, in silence or with the aid of chanting, for religious or spiritual purposes or as a method of relaxation. — “I set aside time every day to write and meditate”
2. think deeply or carefully about (something). — “he went off to meditate on the new idea”
3. plan mentally; consider. — “they had suffered severely, and they began to meditate retreat”

Perhaps with these word siblings, exploring them offers more than a mere explanation of the inherent difficulties caused by their overlap. Perhaps there is something to be unlocked and appreciated when we talk about mediate and meditate. Here lies the hope that there is a way, a new way, of being with one another, a way that promises consciously holding many things at once: our individual wholeness, differences, and inherent sameness with spacious intimacy.

Both mediation and meditation ask participants to be present, thoughtful, and mindful.

Both meditation and mediation are premised on an understanding of the need to cultivate our gentle, unprejudiced natures, to practice observing our thoughts and emotions with detachment.

There is something both simple and exalted in both practices.

At times, at its best, something honest and sacred.

In mediation, we navigate both attach and attack. Mediation provides the possibility of keeping company with one particular kind of attachment while it transforms into another. Partners can transition from married into another way of being attached; a way that better fits their unique circumstances. Instead of conceptualizing their attachment as terminating altogether, by considering a different attachment, an innovative way forward can emerge. This requires navigating the attack inherent in the rupturing of the old attachment and creating a fresh way of being together.

In both mediation and meditation, we invite gentleness with what is hardest inside us and between us. Mediation and meditation deal with the pragmatic — how do we divide assets, how do we be here in this world, breathing in and out? Both mediate and meditate deal with the esoteric and the existential, locating the essential observing self, discovering that our spirit seems to belong to us as well as every other thing that breathes. Mediation traverses the banal and the philosophical — the what will I drive when this lease expires next week, who keeps the better TV, how do we raise our children in this different reality, and how do we love one another in a way that makes this possible, even when the coffers of good feeling are empty.

Mediation provides a process of respect for the other. Meditation provides a process for respecting the self. Both make a place to be willingly present to what is.

Both practices ask participants to build their tolerance for the discomfort of the present moment, and also open to the ease it promises. Both practices ask participants to hold the practical and the unknowable, the particulars and the global, like ancient g-ds pictured with opposite objects in each hand — a thunderbolt in one, a newborn in the other.

The wisdom of word pairs points us to the rigors of consciousness demanded by our humanness, our pairing, and our parting. They instruct on the inherent challenges of being together (attach/attack) and advise how we might cultivate the grounded patience to manage conflict within our togetherness (meditate/mediate).

Consider the words of Rumi to summarize how we might hold ourselves and others in conflict and love.

You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.