We’ve been in training
I’m writing this on the morning after the US has once again downshifted into some seriously dark who-knows-what sort of future—one that’s too big for even me, an historically expert bypasser, famed acrobat in the art of It’s All Going to Be OK, to find any purchase, anything to point to to say “look! It’s fine.”
It’s not. Of course it’s not.
Walking around yesterday, though, in the last moments of the Before Times (this round of them anyway) I did notice the ways folks have been working to stay in the light. Not in falsely hopeful or cheerful or naively determined ways, but in the more grounded ways we’ve learned over these recent years.
Yes, learned.
It occurs to me that, since 2016ish, we’ve been in training. Like most deep and effective training, it’s worked because we haven’t necessarily been out to achieve any one thing. We’ve simply kept showing up for the challenges in front of us and, in doing so, we’ve developed some serious skills.
Truly, look at all we’ve been working on for this last almost-decade. For instance, we know about trauma now. It’s no longer a big scary extreme shadowy label reserved for unimaginable situations. We understand how it happens on every level, how to recognize it and to meet it. There’s even such a thing as being ‘trauma informed,’ and so many of us are, or working to be, that the phrase itself is a common one. Scores of people are training as healers to help folks move through their trauma… or better yet, prevent it.
We’ve learned about checking in with each other, how much of a difference that can make. We’re doing that everywhere today, pretty automatically. It’s a long-dormant instinct reawakened in the pandemic and beyond.
More of us are, at long last, awake to the injustices perpetrated and perpetuated in this country. We’ve learned to keep our eyes and hearts open to it. We’re working everyday to be more inclusive, be better allies. To stay aware and make sure history isn’t repeated, or at least notice when it is and not let it stand. We’re standing up for each other. Exercising self-compassion and patience with one another. We’re willing to be messy and imperfect in it because it won’t get done any other way.
We’ve learned so damn much about grief: its realities and its nuances and the many ways to be with it. It’s something we’ve become deeply familiar with, individually and collectively, and inside whose corners we have found new ways of connecting.
We are doing far less flailing. More and more I see folks giving up the notion that outrage is going to get us anywhere. Instead we are turning inward, finding ground in ourselves. We’re feeling our pain fully, letting it exist, not denying it, understanding on a soul level that adage that says the only way out is through.
We’re seeking out as much good news, as many sweet stories as will balance out the bummers. And we’ve come to recognize a lot of positivity in our midst as toxic.
We’re holding space for one another. We’re forming circles. We’re cleaning up our own messes. We’re learning about generosity and boundaries and how neither of those can exist without the other. We’re each welcoming a broader range of experiences—our own and others.’
Do not mistake any of this for hope, though.
None of this is going to turn the tide. It never was. Because—and here’s where I’ll lose some of you I know—we were never going to turn it. No matter how many pleas to the rationality, the sanity, even the fear in people. No matter how immovable our own integrity, how fierce our love. No matter how surprised at or disappointed we are today. No matter how much we analyze or try to understand it.
It’s a tide. Tides don’t turn, except in their own time, set to a clock of a far greater intelligence. And actually that’s one idea in which I am finding some real, deep settling.
There was no ambiguity in the decision America made. It was clear, unmistakable, and not for any lack of trying to prevent it. Our country, our world, is in a place of deep fear, trauma, brokenness. We are lost, and when we’re lost we’ll usually respond to whatever voice rings out most loudly in the darkness. This election has proven that beyond a doubt. I find a strange comfort in this clarity. In a sense, we know exactly what we’re working with.
Another idea that relieves me a bit is the idea that our civilization is gasping its last, and we are not going to restore, revive, or reanimate anything.
Terminal lucidity
Have you ever been at a deathbed? Do you know (or have you heard) how sometimes, days or hours before the end, the dying person rallies in impossible ways, awake, moving, eating, laughing, before eventually, inevitably returning to their process of rapid decline?
Science has given this state the gorgeously poetic name “terminal lucidity,” and I think that’s where the old ways are now. They are dying—collapsing in on themselves, as they were always going to. These crusty, harmful systems and those who work so hard to uphold them are on their way out to be sure, but not before passing through those mysterious final moments of resurgence before death comes—which, in this case, means the ignorance, the injustice, the greed, the bigotry, the fear mongering, the violence are amplified.
None of it will last, no, but history has a much longer lifespan than any one human. The terminal lucidity on this beast will last years. It will bang around, knock shit over, get drunk, party its ugly face off and do a lot of damage in the process.
Unfortunately, in this moment in history, we are caught in the throes of this. It’ll likely take a lot of us down with it.
Here’s where our training comes in.
We actually do know what to do in the face of this chaos. We’ve been doing it. For the last eight years (and much, much longer for some), each in our own ways, we’ve been growing capacity in our hearts and our minds and our bodies, and we are capable of so much more healing than we ever have been.
Of course, by all means, keep fighting if you must. I fully understand that this is how many of us navigate the pain we feel. Don’t give up. Work hard. Turn things around. Believe that can happen. I’m not here to throw an ice bucket over belief. It’s a powerful thing, and it may yet get us somewhere.
I for one am done trying to revive ideas that may once have been alive and vibrant, but that have clearly run their course. I feel more called to tend the garden of what has been growing up inside the destruction all along. The new ways of living we’ve been cultivating without even knowing it.
This doesn’t mean there won’t be suffering—indeed, there will likely be more of it before there is less. There will be more brokenness and scariness and strife. We’ll watch this tidal wave of fear manifest in the world in unbearable ways, surely. Our hearts will keep breaking.
But we know how to be with this.
That’s another really important part of our training—maybe even the most important: we’ve grown some serious capacity for discomfort these last years. We are each highly trained professionals in being uncomfortable. Of course it’s not fair that we’ve had to, we shouldn’t have had to, but again, it is what has happened. Look at all the ways we’ve adapted, made it work in impossible circumstances. And yup, that’s surfaced trauma. And yup, we’ve held each other in it. And on it has gone, and on it will go, until this healing cycle is complete.
We’ve become goddamn warriors. We’ve held each other in our ongoing grief. There are few things more beautiful than that.
There’s no need to start anything now. We’ve already begun. Whatever happens, we are (no, of course not everyone, but if you are reading this, you are) perhaps more ready for it than we realize. There may not be hope for things to return to how they were, but if we look closely, we might start to see that we’ve already started to create something new.
