Do you remember 2015? I remember it kind of vaguely but one thing stands out: The number of people I know who at the end of the year said “Well thank goodness that’s over. Next year has to be better. Here’s to 2016!”
Flash forward to 2020 and, well, here we are.
Do we need a reminder of what here is? I’m sure we are all painfully aware but in case you are reading from the future, and somehow have not heard about the second decade of the 21st century, here includes: a surge in the number of authoritarian governments and a global trend away from multilateralism toward insular, nationalistic politics; the most powerful economy and military in the world being governed by a verbally incontinent authoritarian manchild without any sign of prudence or responsibility; the most dramatic climate shifts seen in human history, with Earth’s systems in genuine peril; and, of course, a long-predicted-yet-somehow-unexpected viral pandemic causing almost a million deaths worldwide (and counting) and the worst economic crash in living memory.
Oh sweet summer children of 2015.
And yet here we are; doing our best to do our jobs (if we still have them), juggling videoconferences, rationed time in physical workspaces, fretting about whether to send children back to school and desperately wishing it would all get back to normal.
I invite you to shed the illusion of normal. It wastes a good crisis, and can only set us up for disappointment.
Even during my own short life, I challenge you to tell me which year was normal. Was it 1973, the year I was born amid the OPEC oil crisis? Was it the 1980s, the decade of my schooling, when we lived under the threat of thermonuclear annihilation, and my own country simmered on the verge of violent revolution? Was it the 1990s, when I came of age, communism and apartheid fell, and the world radically realigned itself around a single pole of power? Was it the 2000s, which opened with 9/11 and descended from there into an unending war that continues to influct suffering and death to this day? Or perhaps the 2010s, when inequality and the climate crisis ran rampant and ushered in the worldwide chaos we see now?
When, exactly, was normal? And for whom? And what about it do we want back?
Will mass vaccination against Sars-Cov2 cause the vicious divisions in our society to recede into memory? Will a Biden presidency bring back the Greenland ice? Will the conclusion of the most fraught phase of Brexit ease the dramatic inequality that is fueling class and racial tensions?
The answer is no. There is no normal to get back to. And to wish away the present is also to waste the unique opportunity it gives us to make decisions -individually and collectively – about our futures. We have the opportunity to rethink the way we want to organise our societies and, particularly, our working lives. Yet governments seem in a desperate rush to discourage that rethinking, and to push people back into crowded, environmentally destructive commutes and stressful offices, solely for the benefit of commercial landlords. Don’t let them.
Realise, too, that no matter how soon we have mass vaccinations, and what any given election decides, we have entered one of history’s fraught periods. As a society, we have to decide how we want to cope with the inevitable wave of crises that will unfold in the coming years and decades. Will we take the approach of retreating into insular national communities, bristling with guns against scary outsiders, or will we try to address the underlying challenges in a constructive way?
As individuals, we do have choices about how we cope, and how we shape our own and our communities’ lives going forward. But we can only exercise these choices properly when we are not thrashing around looking for security from the very institutions that are undermining it. We must find a place of peace internally if we are not to be either overwhelmed into paralysis, or reduced to a series of thoughtless reflexes.
I urge you to adopt or renew an active spiritual practice. Place yourself in relationship with the women and men who have weathered history’s storms and been their societies’ lights in the darkness, by finding peace and stability from another source.
The Daily Office, Mindfulness Prayer, Sitting Zazen, performing salat, praying daily prayer, secular mindfulness exercises — there is a spiritual tool for everybody, but it is only with regular practice that we gain the skill to find that stability and peace; that sense of wholeness and communion that does not depend on the vagaries of our daily life and historical moment.
In the midst of the madness, find your way to touch the eternal.