About Coping with Reality These Days
“Breaking Wave; painting as mnemonic for change,” oil on linen 1992 12”x12.”
I think it’s important to face, feel and embrace the rage, terror and exhaustion that is part of our present reality. That doesn’t mean we’re helpless and should give up. It does mean we need to expand and honor our capacity for humility and empathy, including for how exhausting this all is.
Perhaps I should clarify what prompted my current frustration besides the new shooting event in Buffalo by a young white nationalist. I had attended a local event about youth activism for climate change. Several local young people participated with two adults who lead these kinds of events. One of the young women asked, how to deal with her feelings. The two adults both said, “we just do the next right thing.” That may work for most adults but recent research tells us that many young people are on the brink of suicide over the realities we’re all facing.
At the event, the younger woman thanked the adults and said no more. I waited till the relatively small audience dissipated and then quietly walked up to her on the stage so we weren’t in everyone’s hearing and told her that I’d been working on climate change since 1989 and had learned that it’s important to own those feelings of hysteria, because we all have them and without acknowledging them, people can feel over-whelmed and isolated. She looked enormously relieved, I think, because I could give her permission to relax that stiff upper lip so prized in many Anglo-Saxon circles. I suspect that people like the Buffalo shooter never got that chance to feel and accept their feelings; instead all their feelings got perverted and channeled into the hate that pulled his trigger.
Our present reality legitimately triggers rage and terror for many reasons, from the rise of racism and anti-Semitism with the horrific “replacement” mantra spreading virally across the world to the regressive fossil fuel policies now being embraced by “leaders,” in the UK and North America. I think we all need to build our courage. Some writers have, I think, correctly identified grief as one of the most crucial feelings we need to embrace, what Glenn Albrecht calls “Solastalgia”. There is no simple answer to our present, not even from Donna Haraway or Joanna Macy, tho I think their wisdom is certainly part of the mix.
The worst thing we can do now, in my opinion, is to try to pollyanna our way out of the present or rally the troops for some hard-muscled stoicism. People died and are dying and will die and that cannot be ignored, along with all the animals going extinct, etc. This is beyond tragedy. Why face, accept and feel these awful feelings? I would argue that we can’t be useful until we feel it all, including our personal needs to be gentle and non-judgmental with ourselves, let alone anyone else as we grieve. Denial delays the inevitable confrontation with the totality of reality.
As the child and relative of people murdered for being Jewish, as a person who has encountered anti-Semitism in France, Switzerland, Scotland and in many places in America, events like what just happened in Buffalo NY, evokes trauma I endure for hours. But that trauma is little different than what I feel every time I learn of another species going extinct or the effects of ecocide.
And I believe the root causes are the same, whether ecocide or the denial of the horror of the ecocidal effects of climate change: a scarcity of empathy for all life, including the respect we might have for all life expressed in so many ways, from restricting our births to what we eat. But we don’t. We don’t have that expansive empathy that might guide our choices, including periodic choices to rest and feel the tsunami of realistic feelings that can drown us individually and leads to inertia and denialism for many.
Towards the end of my book Divining Chaos, I wrote something that often comes back to me and helps me sustain some courage and strength, “there will be another time.” It reminds me that whatever I do or say is part of a continuum that is totally impersonal and has nothing to do with individual leadership or “desired” outcomes in my lifetime. Meanwhile. we each do what we can, individually and collectively, honoring each other and death where, when and how we can with some measure of humility despite the gut-wrenching anguish we must all feel.
I wrote further about the specifics of how I experience and think about the present on FB:
“Yesterday morning, I was overcome with terror for several hours over the Buffalo massacre by a white nationalist. My courage muscles failed me. We live in grim times getting grimmer. Sometimes part of the work is to be gentle with ourselves and each other in this dark night. For the past few days, the light has been so overcast by fog that there were no dawns to speak of to share, but I know there will be spectacular dawns again. Even the RNC, with all their maddened and lethal cohorts advocating ecocide and femicide in their policies, can't permanently dim the dawn any more than Putin, apparently, can destroy Ukrainian resistance to his lies and fascist bullying.”
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult-health/in-depth/denial/art-20047926