Exhaustion and Opportunity

I’ve seen a number of articles in the Times and the Globe that have focused on the rising concerns about the mental health of our nation. The days are getting shorter and cooler as winter approaches. Those of us in the northern climes will begin having to spend more time inside—and this is just after some of us had begun feeling comfortable with socially distanced backyard visits with friends. The meager semblance of normal we have created will have to change. Again!

Our President is now touting a vaccine that will be a game-changer and will certainly be ready for mass distribution within the next few weeks. But he also touted a health care plan that would be better and cheaper than the one his predecessor created. That was four years ago and nothing has materialized on that front so most of us don’t expect his promise of a widely available vaccine is anything other than the continued ranting of a delusional authoritarian strongman.

Colleges and universities are struggling to keep students safely on campus. (I do think the reckless partying behavior of a significant percentage of the students is verification that the full reasoning capacity of the human brain does not come on line, especially in young men, until the early twenties.) I heard yesterday of a school district in California that has already decided they will be in virtual mode through the entire school year. More restaurants and businesses shutter their operations daily. THIS is our new abnormal and it just drags on and on.

How do we make new lives with what we have when what we have is not what we want? I suppose this is the perennial human question. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably already noticed that everything always keeps changing and the things we have, we have only temporarily. This is just the universe appears to be constructed.   But in a culture such as America’s where the meaning of life is tied in to endless growth and accumulation, these changes and losses provokes a crisis of meaning.

But maybe I am being too doctrinaire. Maybe it’s not just our pernicious capitalist culture that is our problem. Our current crisis is also about the unprecedented challenge of living with less physical and in person social contact. We are, after all, mammals who are genetically programmed to live in herds and tribes. We like to sniff around and check out each other. Who’s here with me? Who’s our leader? What’s our task? We love to be part of a team with a clear mission. We are hard wired to orient around purpose and collaboration. When the direction is clear and our relationships are in order, we are happy.

People who study physical and social systems sometimes say that a system can only make fundamental change when it is far from equilibrium. When things are going well, the inertia of the status quo prevents any significant deviation from the usual. When things are deeply disturbed, then the endless experiments that arise gain new significance and can influence the whole system.

The time of break-down is also the time of new life. Though many people I talk to are struggling with exhaustion and discouragement, many of them are also reporting their new necessity of living in deeper alignment with what is most important. ‘Being nice’ and just ‘going along’ are not viable options in a time of crisis. This disturbing time both allows and forces us to do a new kind of work within ourselves. With our usual coping strategies taken away, we have no choice but to find something deeper.

We are all swimming in the deep end of the pool now—no more splashing around in the shallows. Drowning is a real possibility, but so is discovering some natural buoyancy of things that we had not trusted before. It’s exhausting but also exhilarating.

Now that everything is different, what do YOU want to make of your life? What is most important? And though you can never know the outcome of your actions, what is the next step that you’re willing to take?