My Thoughts for Today — On Collective Pain, Hope, and Personal Agency
I am trying something new today and am coming from a more raw place, as opposed to the carefully crafted articles you normally see on my blog. Let me know what you think.
There is a collective pain in the world today, felt by people from all corners of the planet. Even in areas where there isn’t active and acute suffering, there is still a palpable tension in the air, an electrical charge in the atmosphere that induces a sickly sense of unease.
There is anticipation of war to come, that we’re experiencing the beginning of the end. That fairly soon, a few powerful players will attempt to play their hands and the rest of us will feel it when they do. A battle among gods, or so it seems. Are we really all at the mercy of a small handful of people with power?
We ask ourselves what we can do and are met with a range of responses. We often shift the blame to someone “responsible”, to the people who got us into this mess in the first place, as if putting pressure on those individuals and groups will ultimately force them to remedy the situation for us. Our minds quickly fill with solutions we are unable to enact. We feel powerless because we are just “one person”, with only so many hours in a day to spend. We are bogged down enough by our daily chores that the thought of participating in something larger already has us exhausted with no plan for action.
I am of the mindset that there is still hope, because we have today and we have agency, if we recognize that we do and exercise it. Liberation from the problems of the world may not arrive in one fell swoop, rescuing us all from our collective suffering instantly. More likely than not, it will be comprised of a series of small actions by many people, with an awareness that we all play a role in the world we surround ourselves with, even if those actions are simply not to perpetuate all that we have been subject to in our lifetimes. This, of course, is always much easier said and rarely done.
I believe change comes from the smallest windows of opportunity. What if I decided to take a different route home today? What if, instead of allowing my optimistic thoughts to remain thoughts, I put them onto paper? What if I allowed myself to imagine the life I want, and then allowed that imagination to seep into my everyday life, infusing my reality with a bit more choice than I had before? Our world may not change overnight, but these tiny windows of opportunity are holes in which we can plant seeds for that desired future to occur one day.
When it comes to the work I would like to do here, I am all too aware of how frustrating it can feel to be told to “do more” or “do differently”. Nobody wants to be told what to do, and the guilt that comes with the feeling of not doing enough is likely to paralyze anyone with good intentions.
Personally, I just focus on the areas where I can and want to help. Today I have the energy to sit down and write on this laptop the words that may reach you. Tomorrow I may view success as just making it through the day in one piece, depending on what the world decides to throw at me then. I have plans to share what I’ve learned in the last several years, with the hope that even a small fragment of my experience can reach someone and impact them in some beneficial way, even if it is only a moment of peace, reassurance, or validation. Our paths will look very different but through my work I hope to encounter opportunities where they may cross and intertwine as we embark on this journey through life.
What is a small joy you may experience today if you allowed yourself to? Is it taking a moment to look at the flowers growing on your street? Running yourself a warm bath at the end of a long day? Perhaps it is allowing a moment for felt emotions to exist and be witnessed, if they are typically shut down by the demands of the working world. Whatever that small joy or relief may look like to you, I invite you to take a moment, a minute, to ask yourself what that is right now and see if you can give it room to exist and grow.
It is not our random acts of self care that will remedy the current global situation, but rather the development of our relationship in responding to life’s nudges to be experienced that will nourish us and empower us to utilize the agency we all have, in whatever capacity we can.
