The great rearranging
Never have I ever seen so many things leap out of their settled patterns so wildly, so quickly.
Can you feel it? The great rearranging underway?
On the personal level, the examples are obvious and many. I can feel my identity as a performer slipping away like the memory of a dream. I quit the gym membership I’ve had for more than a decade. People I used to see on the reg are drifting away, or I am, or we all are, as the circumstances that used to bring us together have ceased to exist. Paths that ran parallel for years have abruptly veered apart.
Then there are the cultural and political levels.
Right-wing militias are exercising their second amendment rights to defend government and police. And COVID-19 has liberals calling for conformity, deference to authority, and limitations on personal physical autonomy.
It does make some sense. The liberal ethos of “Do whatever you want as long as it’s not hurting others,” is butting up against the limitations of that second clause, as person A’s freedom increasingly seems able to hurt (or infect) person B. Still, it’s striking — the norm reversals unfolding before our eyes.
For most of my life, liberals were the anti-shame party. They wanted people to be able to live out loud. Gay, feminist, trans, sex worker, atheist, addict, eccentric, fringe… get in here. This is a big tent. You do you, boo. We’ll do our best to make sure you can make the choices you feel are right for you. We want you to feel joy. We want you to feel pleasure.
We’re the kids in Footloose busting out to DANCE and to LIVE, not the stodgy, moralizing adults who see happiness as evidence of sin.
Now my social media feed is full of people scolding others who have the audacity to try to salvage a shred of joy and pleasure from their lives. The lens seems largely political: as if anyone experiencing pleasure or expressing joy while Trump is president is tacitly endorsing Trump. The communally encouraged state of being is dread and misery and rage. People who eat at restaurants, people who let their kids play on playgrounds, people who walk around the lake without a mask — all condemnable, contemptible. Selfish. How dare they?
I worry that in the absence of the real, nourishing pleasure of togetherness, we’re increasingly turning to the more toxic, shallow pleasure of judgement and moral superiority.
And the lack of real-life togetherness is making it easier to reduce each other to cardboard cutouts, the way driving cars makes us prone to irritation and rage at other drivers. When we can’t see each other as humans — only as avatars or cars — we lose so much of our softness toward each other. We lose that thread of embodied energy connecting my spirit to yours.
Everyone is doing their own calculus when making their choices about how to live these days. Some have concluded — by evaluating their personal risk factors and interpreting the news headlines and local public health stats — that they don’t want to go into shops or walk outdoors in crowded areas. They want to get their groceries and other essentials delivered, stay in, and minimize contact with others.
Others have looked at their own constellation of factors and needs, and come to different conclusions. There’s a huge spectrum of ways people feel about the right balance between sensible precautions to protect themselves and others and what they need to do for their own economic, mental, physical, and relational wellbeing.
We all have different relationship, family, and health statuses; different levels of need for finding touch and companionship outside our homes; we all have differently sized amygdalas (the part of the brain that dictates risk tolerance); your calculus is not going to resemble mine, and mine is not going to resemble my neighbor’s.
Those who aggressively flaunt a disdain for masks aside, it seems to me that the vast majority of us are trying to navigate our individual circumstances as responsibly as possible, even if one person's idea of what that looks like for them is different from another's.
The virus is one thing that can hurt us, but there are others. Fear, shame, loneliness, anxiety, depression, poverty, isolation… I guess I’m not interested in checking the math of everyone around me, online or in real life, to see where their personal equation lands, in terms of how to minimize the most total potential harm in their life.
As I was prepping to write this newsletter, I posed the question on Facebook and Twitter: “Do you feel like you have to hide (or are less inclined to share) pleasurable or fun activities you do outside your home?” The answers were striking. The folks who said no all explained that they’re not doing anything risky, so they have nothing to hide.
A lot of other folks said yes. And the reasons they gave were only partially about COVID risk shaming; they also mentioned wanting to be seen as appropriately somber in this dark time of civil unrest.
All this seems to add up to a new relationship we’ve communally developed with social media. It’s a place we go to demonstrate our goodness, display our adherence to the rules, and show our fealty to the approved positions on social issues.
Our real lives — the parts that are messy, fun, joyful, playful, morally ambiguous, less than perfectly ethically vetted — stay in the shadows.
This is certainly true for me. Earlier this month I flew to California for a few days to visit one of my best friends. She picked me up at LAX and we drove to Palm Springs, where we had an Airbnb for two nights. We stopped at the grocery store on our way to the house, stocked up for the weekend, and other than a morning hike on Saturday, we spent the whole time hanging out at the house until she dropped me off at the Palm Springs airport on Sunday afternoon. (I feel I need to tell you that I got tested for COVID four days after returning home; the results were negative.)
We didn’t share a single picture or post about the trip online. Not on Instagram, not on Facebook, not on Twitter. On the one hand, it felt like a naughty indulgence — something we had to do on the DL to keep from getting in trouble. On the other, it was a revelation: This chance to rediscover privacy. To inhabit my experience without broadcasting it or framing it for public consumption.
I wonder if that’s one of the gifts embedded in this wild pendulum swing away from packaging our lives for constant digital consumption, toward a wariness of the judgement of others. I don’t love that shame and fear are the driving forces, but maybe those things will self-correct a bit as the pendulum settles. And we’ll be able to keep this new immediacy, this direct experience of reality, this full-bodied inhabiting of our complex offline lives.
It’s the great rearranging — everything has been thrown up in the air. I’m trying to keep my feet on the ground as I watch where it all lands.
And I’m keeping my eye on my own math, trying to make it all keep adding up to grace.
"As soon as the generals and politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it.
Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn't go.
Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection."
~ Wendell Berry
Stuff I Love
My buddy John Catron is a wonderful artist, onstage and off. This is his new digital gallery show, with many paintings still available for purchase. Check it out!
This podcast conversation blew my mind. It's one of the most spirit-opening conversations about race I've heard in a long, long time, featuring Charles Eisenstein and Mellody Hayes, a physician-writer, speaker, spiritual teacher and Executive Director of Ceremony Health, a faith-based psychedelic healing center.
This is an essay Quinton and I recently wrote, directed to Trump supporters who sincerely fear that a Biden administration spells doom for America. We started with empathizing with that feeling (which we've felt from the other side of the aisle) and then broke down why there's no need for panic.
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