gravity and grace
on the tyranny of expectations
All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception.
— Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
I confess: I didn’t understand Weil when I first read her. But I was obsessed with the music of her language so, unintentionally, I had the first page of Gravity and Grace memorized. Months later, scrolling through Facebook, a post caught my attention, and something clicked into place.
Observe, side-by-side:
One way to understand Weil is that there is a natural force (call it gravity) that governs how we behave. What we expect of each other depends on how we experience gravity, which is influenced by some combination of personal experience, neurochemical makeup, and cultural norms. I feel the force of gravity when I’m having a bad day at work. My soul feels heavy, weighed down. I might have a knee-jerk reaction to anyone who needs something from me. I also feel it when the person I’m dating shows more interest in me than I’m willing or able to reciprocate; it’s discomforting, and I retreat.
Weil uses the example of having a headache and wanting to strike another person on the same spot in the head so they can feel the same pain. Reciprocity is a key characteristic of gravity. In its crudest form, the effect of gravity can manifest as revenge or schadenfreude. Other times, it’s not a desire to inflict punishment so much as an expectation that the other person should feel or behave a certain way. Example: After a breakup, I feel sad, and I want to know that my ex feels equally sad. Or my friend said something hurtful, and my expectation is that she’ll later regret it and feel remorse.
In relationships, much of our suffering can be traced to expectations. There are so many ways in which we hold people up to standards of behavior that may seem reasonable but only through the lens of our own experience. As that Facebook post put it, you don’t know what shit the other person is going through and therefore can’t control how they will receive your energy.
Expectations are bi-directional: (1) I expect people to behave in certain ways, and (2) I also experience their expectations of me.
One day this week, I made a conscious effort to catalog my expectations, and for each one, I asked if this was something I could let go of. Here are a few that I caught, but there are probably more that I’m not even aware of:
If she cares about our friendship, she’ll take the initiative to ask me to hang out.
If he wants to see me, he’ll text back within an hour (silence must mean he doesn’t want to see me).
If they don’t ping me, it means they don’t really need me in this meeting so I can skip it.
Notice how these assumptions cause me to withdraw instead of engage. Like gravity, our expectations weigh us down. They are disempowering, putting our peace of mind in someone else’s hands. When unmet, they beget feelings of disappointment, frustration, and resentment. Wouldn’t we be so much happier if we could free ourselves from these shackles?
There are also ways in which we feel the burden of someone else’s expectations, and this, too, can cause us to retreat.
What is the reason that as soon as one human being shows he needs another (no matter whether his need be slight or great) the latter draws back from him? Gravity.
— Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
When someone in the park yells “heads!” my instinct is to look for the flying object and get out of its way. It would be unnatural to stand still or move toward it. Likewise, it’s normal to initially draw back when someone shows they need you, even if you care about them. It’s an act of self-preservation, an automatic response of the nervous system, a safeguard against the possibility that they want more than you’re able to provide. Distance is sometimes necessary to properly assess what someone needs and how much you can give.
It’s easy to see this concept play out in relationships. It pretty much describes the anxious-avoidant dynamic, especially if you believe that attachment styles are fluid and situational—when one person pursues, the other withdraws—rather than static, permanent traits. The person who withdraws is typically responding to an expectation that their partner wants more than they’re able to give.
So does this mean we’re doomed to play out this dance of advance-and-retreat forever?
In contrast to gravity, grace is the absence of expectation in either direction. The word “grace” comes from theology: the freely given, unmerited favor and love of God. If gravity is natural, grace is divine. If gravity is base, grace is noble.
Grace—good will that’s free of expectation—can pull us out of the vicious cycle of pursuit and withdrawal. In some ways, it harks back to Aristotle’s definition of love: willing the good of the other. If we allow our actions to be governed by grace, we provide for others simply out of good will, not out of obligation or the hope of receiving something in return.
So what does it look like to act out of grace, instead? Here are a few hypothetical examples:
You broke off our engagement, and even though I’m devastated, I’m going to help you move out because I respect your decision.
You need my help getting a job, and even though you treated me like shit, I’m going to help you anyway because I want what’s good for you.
The key to grace is to be less self-focused.
But it’s so hard.
As Weil puts it, “the same suffering is harder to bear for a high motive than a base one.” Base motives carry more energy than noble ones. Think of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: If I don’t have food or shelter, you can be sure I’m doing everything I possibly can to obtain food and shelter. Survival is the basest human need, and therefore, the strongest motivator, carrying with it the greatest energy.
It’s worth noting that Maslow never conceived of his hierarchy of needs as a pyramid. That was created later because corporate America loves a good pyramid. This simplification of Maslow’s theory perpetuates a misconception that you must obtain the needs within one level in order to ascend to the next. You can jump between levels or pursue different types of needs at the same time. But I do think that for someone who has a dream job, good health, a beautiful house, a happy family, close friends, and a general sense of well-being and accomplishment, the energy required to obtain self-actualization is greater than it is to secure food and shelter. Similarly, the energy required to help a person in need purely out of good will is much greater than it is to perform the same service knowing that your survival depends on it or you have something material to gain from it (money, status, connections).
Toward the end of his life, Maslow wanted to revise his theory to include transcendence as the pinnacle of human needs, above self-actualization. His view of transcendence shares a thread with Weil’s concept of grace. It’s about relating to all things as ends rather than as self-serving means.
From Maslow’s lecture “The Farthest Reaches of Human Nature”:
The fully developed (and very fortunate) human being working under the best conditions tends to be motivated by values which transcend his self. They are not selfish anymore in the old sense of that term. Beauty is not within one’s skin nor is justice or order. One can hardly class these desires as selfish in the sense that my desire for food might be. My satisfaction with achieving or allowing justice is not within my own skin . . . . It is equally outside and inside: therefore, it has transcended the geographical limitations of the self.
A person who’s able to transcend the self isn’t necessarily happier. They just have different preoccupations. Their concerns are cosmic rather than local. I think of the transcendent soul as floating in space. It feels weightless, experiencing microgravity, rather than the very strong force that is felt on Earth.