These are troubling times, to say the least.
We are facing the most widespread and extensive global health emergency in at least 100 years. Our economy is reeling like a boxer beaten to delirium. Opinions have become “facts.” Social unrest is boiling. The political “speech” (such as it is), centered on the removal or retention of arguably the most controversial, divisive, and polarizing administration anyone can remember; has evolved into that of a couple of three-year-olds yelling “You’re a poohead!” “No, your face is!” It feels like we’re together, no strings attached in a rusty old school bus from the 50’s; no seatbelts, hurtling down a bumpy mountain road, out of control, clinging to her life as she screams in terror for someone to save us as we plummet off a cliff on November 3. We hope we don’t go over the edge; Assuming eventually everything will be alright. However, that irritating inner voice refuses to shut up and says, “Don’t get your hopes up” and keeps getting louder. I just want everything to stop.
But wait, there is more!
Ghia, the Earth Mother, is facing an existential crisis that brings endless firestorms, unrelenting floods, dry drafts, and generally exceptionally severe weather, which is devastating property and lives (including non-humans) at an unrelenting rate. unprecedented global level. (For the record, I long to live in a world where the word “unprecedented” is no longer a standard adjective.)
The catalog of events that imprison us, oppress our chest and produce anxiety has us on very tight triggers, damaging our collective physical and mental and emotional health. For those of us who can remember it, 1968 is a Disney fairy tale compared to Stephen King’s horror story of 2020. No one, not a single person alive today, has lived through an upheaval like this. None of us.
Of course, I don’t need to tell you. You see it. You feel it. You’re living it, just like me. As the curse says, we are living in “fascinating” times.
It’s a challenge to keep hope high when even the sky is covered in a thick layer of burning smoke.
However, a flicker crossed my mind.
In the field of behavior change, it is known that the trigger that causes change is a combination of fear, strength, and pain. After all, no one wakes up one morning, examines their lifestyle, decides everything is idyllic, and proclaims, “God, I love my life! Let me see how I can change it.” No, change only makes itself known once we are exhausted, scared, scarred, battered, and overwhelmed. It’s called “hitting rock bottom,” that gut-wrenching feeling that something, anything, is better than where we are, so despite whatever pain or uncertainty awaits us, we grudgingly, reluctantly, tenuously walk cautiously toward what we are. new. If done gently and repeatedly, the change evolves.
As individuals, as a society, as a global community inextricably bound together as one, that is where we are now: hitting rock bottom.
Therefore, I am trying, I admit feebly, to see these days not as the end times, but as the impetus that makes us question everything, and I hope to take the energy of the turbulence that surrounds us as the catalyst to advance little little by little in the direction of what future historians will call the “New Awakening”. From this pain, I envision a world for our great-grandchildren and beyond that is more compassionate, gentle, kind, supportive, cooperative, and in balance with the planet.
I’m not sure that you and I will live there; it will take generations to complete the arc. But we have to believe, pray, affirm and act as if it will happen. The alternative is unthinkable.
We must not let go of hope. We must remember that we are all in this together.