I hope you are keeping well in your isolation. I have my up times and down times. This past week has been more down for me. It is just beginning to sink in how long this may go on for, and what that means for my life and for the lives of so many others.
I like many folks out there am feeling a profound sense of grief and loss. It is the loss of the world I knew. The loss of normal is profoundly disturbing to me. I find this odd because normal was not working for me. I know I am not alone in this especially here in the States. Normal pretty much gave us this pandemic. It prioritized profits over life. It normalized politicians holding citizen's basic needs hostage to play power games. It celebrated cruelty and racism. It devalued the people that actually keep the economy and the people of our society alive. It was a world that was all about constant consumption, productivity, and environmental depredation. We were literally pillaging the future to pay for the present.
So if it was so horrible why are we mourning its loss? Well it is what we knew, and because it is all most of us knew it feels like a part of us has been ripped away. It also bears a striking similarity to being in a toxic relationship. It was a hard lesson to learn that even when I left a relationship that was abusive and toxic I sometimes still missed the person. Missing them didn't mean I was wrong about leaving. I think what is going on right now is we are missing our relationship with our toxic society, even though it wasn't good for us and was slowly (or in some cases not so slowly) killing us. Still even for those of us who wanted massive societal change, we are just as upset as those content with the status quo. There is so much uncertainty right now. We know the world is changing but we don't know where the new path is taking us. Human beings don't like uncertainty, we do just about anything to avoid it.
I think beyond all of the habituation we miss what we thought of as ourselves and our place in the world, even if the place sucked. We knew where we were, who we were, and had a reasonable idea of where we were going. We miss the idea of our lives, and the shapes that it filled in our days. So many of our distractions are gone right now. Work, socializing, and shopping being the foremost in those distractions. When I complained to one of my guides how lonely I was feeling they reminded me that I had been lonely most of my life. When I pointed out that before the pandemic I could at least go out to the movies or a store, they said, "You are confusing commerce with connection." They also pointed out that I am not alone in this confusion.
Why am I telling you this? Well I am quite sure many of you have reached the stage where you are uncertain what shape the new world will take as the old world passes away. Make no mistake there will be no going back to what was before. Too many people have paid with their lives for that to happen. The world of humanity has stopped in a way it hasn't for quite some time. Many people are questioning whether we should keep things going in the same direction when we start this locomotion back up, or whether we should lay new tracks.
So how about you? Are you grieving the lost world? Are you apprehensive of what form the new world will take? Do you find yourself questioning your goals and where you want to go next? Do you feel unmoored lost in a sea of shadowy prospects? Well that's where most of us are. It's ok to not know where this is going and where you will fit into the overall picture. For now allow yourself to grieve the world that was. Let out the tears, make allies of your fears. Once you have done that take stock of the beauty that remains in the world and in yourself.
Peace and Blessings,
Thomas Mooneagle
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