Everything Belongs (Even on the Tracks)

(or two Kirks, a smirk, and a runaway trolley)

You hear it before you see it. The rails rattling, the metal screaming, the gut-deep vibration of something too heavy to stop. The trolley is coming.

Here’s the situation: Ahead are five people tied to the tracks. To your left: a lever. If you pull it, the trolley will swerve to a side track where one person is tied. Five or one, one or five. Do you pull the lever?

Congratulations. You’ve just been cast in Philosophy 101’s favorite horror story: the trolley problem.

Pull the lever, one dies.
Do nothing, five die.
Math disguised as morality.

The answer might seem obvious: from a utilitarian point of view, you save five, lose one. But what if that one was your grandma? Not the mean one who scolded you for not wearing the bunny suit she bought you last Christmas. The sweet grandma. The one who smelled like potpourri, attic dust, and a hint of baby powder. The one who always had hard candy in her purse. You didn’t care that the candy was a few holidays past its prime and covered in pocket lint. It was the thought that counted, and she always had sweet thoughts.

Do you actually want to kill sweet grandma?!?

Surely you’d rather flatten the five strangers. For all you know they’re racist scoundrels, thieves, or CrossFit guys trying to sell you on macros. Let the trolley have them. Unless, of course, they’re Girl Scouts—mean Girl Scouts—threatening to break your legs if you don’t buy Thin Mints. Tiny but tough.

Would you run over mean Girl Scouts to save grandma?

Choices are messy. Even the word decide shares its root with homicide and suicide. It means to kill. Decisions kill, and in some cases, decisions kill grandmas.

Regardless of the situation, the bottom line is that if you’ve ever stood in front of a real-life lever, you know it isn’t the numbers that keep you awake at night. The Trolley Experiment is clever as a classroom puzzle, but life is rarely that tidy. Most days the tracks are foggy, the ropes invisible, and the lever sticky with somebody else’s sweaty fingerprints.

And the whole time you’re thinking: Why isn’t anyone asking about the psychopath tying people to the tracks?

That’s the trick of the trolley problem. It shrinks reality into a false binary, and you’ve met this trick before. Many of us grew up in households fluent in those binaries. The world was always wheat or chaff, sheep or goats, innocent or dirty. Sorting was our spiritual sport. Sermons promised clarity: who’s in, who’s out, what’s saved, what’s damned. Only later did we realize it was more complicated. It was easy to condemn someone to hell while ignoring their humanity and your own shadow. But we are much more complicated than a duality. And a life of sorting always leaves half of life out. You amputate parts of yourself and shrink the world you live in.

I don’t believe life was meant to be lived this way. I agree with Fr. Richard Rohr: everything belongs.

Which brings me to Kirk. And not just the one you’re thinking of from all the non-stop news coverage. I’m talking about all Kirks, but especially Captain James T. Kirk.

In Star Trek, Captain Kirk hated losing. In the academy he was faced with the Kobayashi Maru. It sounds like the most delicious sushi at a Japanese steakhouse but really it isn’t. It was a simulation where the whole point was to teach humility. The Starfleet cadet faces a no-win scenario, lives are lost no matter what choice you make. It was a real-life trolley experiment, but with a starship, which makes it cooler. In the end, you’re supposed to sit with the defeat, to learn that command means carrying death on your shoulders.

But Kirk didn’t settle for a lever. He chose to re-write the program. He hacked the system so the no-win scenario became winnable. When accused of cheating, he smirked: “I don’t believe in the no-win scenario.”

May we all have the faith of the good Captain Kirk.

If you watch the news, it seems all we have left in this world are no-win scenarios. The way stories are framed, we’re always standing at a lever. Here are your tracks, here are your victims, here is your impossible choice. One side is saintly, one side monstrous. Do you mourn or condemn? Do you side with compassion or with order? Do you pull or not pull? Saint or villain? With us or against us? Do you mourn him, or condemn him?

We have to learn to hack the system because this lever is garbage and reality is bigger and more beautiful.

As Howard Thurman said, “the stars continue to cast their gentle gleam over the desolation of the battlefields.” Which is to say that even by the tracks: a violet opens its purple mouth in the ditch. The sun paints gold across your kitchen table while you argue with the news. A friend holds your hand at the hospital, and you realize tenderness still exists in this bruised world. These aren’t decorations. They’re sacraments. They remind us life is worth saving, even when it looks unsalvageable.

And perhaps this is worth remembering when thinking about all Kirks.

You can mourn without canonizing. You can critique without dehumanizing. You can grieve a death and still argue fiercely with the world that person represented.

And you don’t have to do any of this.

Years of programming make this hard to see. But there is still the question: where is the backdoor, the hack, the code we can rewrite?

I believe the answer is in a non-dual view of the world.

Fr. Richard defines non-dual thinking as the grace to hold opposites together without collapsing them into winners and losers. He often uses the wheat-and-chaff image from Christian scripture, not as a sorting of good people vs. bad people, but as interior realities. Each of us carries both wheat and chaff, truth and illusion, love and fear. The fire that “burns the chaff” is not punishment but liberation, a burning away of what is false so that what is true can remain. Dualistic stories (light/dark, wheat/chaff, sheep/goats) are a necessary starting point, Rohr says, but the goal is to move beyond rigid binaries into seeing the sacred in all things.

To realize that everything belongs. Even wheat. Even chaff. Even our enemies. Even the parts of ourselves that tremble at the lever. Everything.

But to be clear, belonging does not mean blessing. It does not mean that violence, hatred, or cruelty are good. It means refusing to run to our camps, our quick binaries of saint or villain, blessing or cursing. Belonging is about staying in the tension long enough to be changed by it.

So if you hated everything Charlie Kirk stood for, you may still grieve for a wife who lost her husband and children who lost their dad. And if you loved him, you may resist canonizing him and instead face the tragedy of gun violence that stole your hero. In both cases, the tension itself belongs — not to excuse, not to divide, but to invite us into a deeper love, even for our enemies.

And maybe holding that tension moves us to see the wider picture. To notice the children shot in Colorado that very same day. To remember the long line of schoolchildren killed in classrooms across this country. To recall former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who survived her shooting and has carried that scar into a public cry for change. Belonging means refusing to look away. It presses us to widen our grief until it includes the ones we disagree with, the ones we never knew, and the ones we still have time to save.

A non-dual view of the world hacks the system by resisting the violence we do when we try to create a false binary and calculate life (and lives) as units. That cost is incalculable. Suffering, trauma, impossible choices, guilt: none can be contained in categories or balanced in an equation. If we try to calculate, we remain trapped in despair or self-justification. This is the violence of abstraction. If we are always evaluating and looking for the “right” answer we lose out on love, on union, on wholeness, and on the possibilities for real change.

The lever is not the whole story.

Nonduality is considered an operating system upgrade, a rewiring of perception where heart is over head and instead of standing outside reality, sorting it into piles, you experience from within the wholeness. We can get to this non-dual place through contemplative practice: Meditation, Centering prayer, mindfulness, breath prayer, whatever name you give it, they train the heart to slip out of the binary script.

When you notice the mind running, release it, return to silence, again and again. You will soon realize you are not pulling levers automatically anymore. You are rewriting the code. You are choosing a contemplative path where wisdom arises not through calculation, but through union with Love, Compassion, Awareness itself.

Psychological research shows this repeatedly. Contemplative practice is transformative. It helps open up pathways. It gives us hope in these hopeless no-win situations.

Contemplative practice makes us more hopeful. It opens the imagination to see paths where none seemed possible, and gives us the courage to walk them. Hope steadies us in no-win moments, helping us rise when life knocks us down. But hope is not just abstract psychology. It is nourished by beauty. Because beauty is what keeps hope from withering. A non-dual contemplative way of looking at the world opens the pathways to beauty, to hope, to resilience, and even to mercy and self-forgiveness.

The trolley will keep coming. Life will keep handing us levers. But we are not doomed to play the game as written. We can practice non-dual seeing. We can hack the simulation through meditation. We can cling to beauty as the proof that hope is not naïve. Sometimes levers must be pulled, but let that be our choice, not our impulse. Let us see ourselves, and the situation as it is, and choose who we will be as we pull the lever. Let us pull the lever knowing we are not perfect, and we need mercy, and we need self-compassion and maybe forgiveness. And let us choose to offer the same to the world: being compassionate, keeping people accountable, saving lives, loving well, suffering wisely, holding this pain without letting it break us.

And if all else fails, we can borrow a little from Captain Kirk: a smirk at the false binary, a refusal of the no-win scenario, and the stubborn belief that, even in the middle of screeching metal and impossible choices, everything belongs.

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