spirit life and social life

    I have recently been reflecting on the interaction between spirit and social life. One of the concepts I wrestle with is the notion that spiritual practice is 'set apart' in some ways from the everyday world of establishing roles, defining one's career, and so on. Under the umbrella of this belief is the view that spirituality is distant from the practical matters of social life, or that the social/spiritual selves are split in some way. I have heard different variations on this question in discussions about meditation. Sometimes, people express  a fear that 'over-using' the spiritual aspects of their life will distance them from the world and emotions that arise from social interactions. Some even fear that this 'distancing' aspect might make them seem strange to others.
   
    What I am noticing recently, however, is that there is a certain paradox arising as a person becomes fixated on what they believe they absolutely need to do, in order to be 'fully functioning' members of a society or a community. I think the paradox I observe in myself is: the harder I try, the more I create difficulty within. It is almost as though a person were to take their own hand and physically turn a bicycle wheel extremely fast in order to get the bicycle to move more quickly. Besides being a bit dangerous, the notion of exerting control on a moving object to get it to 'do' something better is a bit counter-intuitive. The hand that is always trying to dabble  in the natural forces and control the spinning wheel will eventually get caught in the wheel itself, a victim of its own devices.
 
   The analogy here somewhat applies with social roles in general. If I become fixated on the notion that I must be a certain way to fulfill social connections in the world around me, I end up becoming attached to my own concepts of what should or should not be. I forget that, in fact, there were no concepts in mind that are specific to the social process prior  to my engaging it. To use an example: most relationships I have formed with people and organizations don't happen overnight, or in a mechanical, graduated sequence of becoming. More often, my emotional life with others proceeds spontaneously with its own rhythms, and without the felt sense that I need to be doing something all the time. I only start to get that concept in my head when I sense the impermanence of  the social situation, and want to keep it fixed in place.  That is when I start to panic and cling to an idea of who I should be and what conditions  I need to fulfill to be that person.

    In order to restore that more spontaneous sense of being with myself and others, I think it's helpful to practice imagining what it would be like to lose a cherished role that one has in a social circle or life. That role could be as a best friend, as a lover, as someone fulfilling a responsibility to others, as a leader, as a teacher, etc. Maybe that feeling of losing might seem scary at the beginning, but I found that it's possible for me to dare myself to enjoy losing---even to enjoy being a kind of 'loser' in life. This dare is my way of trying to open a little bit to the forces of change  that compose all experiences. But this exercise also (again, paradoxically) could help me better function as a social person, because it frees me of the need to perfect myself through my roles or others' impressions of me. I am not those roles or impressions, even though I may use them to achieve ends that are beneficial to the social world. In this way, it's easier to navigate scripts that are constantly changing in any case.