Surviving the Fall

Someone emailed me a big question last night. A question too big for me frankly.

They asked (paraphrasing):  What if democracy falls ? What if extremism takes over? How can we stay grounded, how can we prepare ourselves to get through?

“Oh god, I have no idea” I said aloud in my empty home office at the end of the workday.

I’m struggling to stay healthy in a pandemic everyone has decided is over arbitrarily. Everyone one is unmasked, and people are now getting overtly hostile to those who are still wearing them.

Didn’t democracy already fall? I’m already trying to live day by day, supporting my family and community with no idea what the next day will bring or how or if I will survive it.

I slapped my laptop shut.

But then, as often happens, I had a dream:

I am tending a small mixed flock – a herd of lambs and goats, puppies, and children of all ages. There are some other herders and care providers who are gifted at their craft, but they are juniors to me in some way, folks who haven’t “been to the wars and back” as I have.

There are wolves and coyotes about, and like it or not it is my job to get as much of this herd as possible to a safer place. Abdication, false humility isn’t an option. I may not have ever been completely surrounded by predators like this before but there isn’t anyone in my small band who had significantly more experience with feral dogs than myself.

So, with the caveat that I know next nothing about the compounding crises that we are embedded in and that I have also learned a thing or two – I will share whatever meager resources I have at my disposal.

These are merely the frames, perspectives, and practices that I rely on for myself to keep me sane in an insane world.  I have no idea if they will be effective for anyone who may read this.

Everything new is old again

For many, democracy has already fallen, been falling, if by democracy you mean an idealized model of civilization that cares for its citizens equally. 

Democracy never got off the ground at all for Indigenous and Black folks, and has never fully operated for immigrant communities, the disabled, or queer folks.  There is currently on earth, a whole world of people who live under colonization and who have negotiated their lives and deaths under oppressive and autocratic rule.

There are millions upon millions of the dead, scattered across all of history, who have had to do the same.

This distress isn’t new. It is as old as time.

Why should we be exempt?  When so many lives through history, have not?

Listen to them. Read their words, talk to them in your head, call on their knowledge and apologize for the arrogance that led so many of us to believe we had conquered history.

Listen to your elders and ancestors. Listen to communities who have lived these struggles.

From my mid-twenties to my mid-forties my husband and I took care of my grandmother-in-law who had survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. When I was younger, I assumed what she had survived was ancient history. Forty years before was twice as long as I had been alive. I assumed the horrors she had faced had been a historical anomaly.

I was young, foolish, privileged. I didn’t know. I listened, but I didn’t understand.

I hear her now.

Nazis weren’t born monsters. They were normal. Normal people can do monstrous things. Monsters live, dormant, within everyone. We are all capable of being seduced into selecting scapegoats or allowing others to be sacrificed for our security.

When we are in scarcity and sufficiently frightened we are all capable of committing acts of heroism and/or villainy that would be completely unimaginable to us in times of stability and prosperity. We do not know how others will react under such duress, and we do not even know how we ourselves will respond.

Learn to mourn, to surrender, to lose, to succumb.

Only schemas of supremacy demand that losses never be acknowledged, and that victory is mandatory. Everyone else must learn to withstand lost ground, to surrender, to grieve. In times of stability and in eras of crisis those who know how to mourn are those who will eventually be able to find and offer comfort to others in this life of temporality and impermanence. 

There are forces that are more powerful than any individual on this planet. No one gets to stand in victory always.

Those who refuse to grieve twist themselves and others into knots, lash out, abuse reality. Mourning is a survival skill in an era of inevitable loss.

Hone your instincts, heed your intuition, and learn to discern between them.  

Our instinctive responses are designed/have evolved to support our survival in instances of clear and present danger. We leap out of the way of an oncoming car. We hide from a predator, or freeze, or flee, if possible, fight as a last resort.

But when danger is more abstract, complex, or remote in time our instinctive responses can entangle and endanger us. Herding instincts, mob psychologies, and the pathologies of swarms can lure us into thinking all is well as we race toward a precipice.

Here our subtler skills, pre-conscious pattern detection, our intuition, is often a better guide. What do your dreams say? Mine told me that even though I instinctively avoided this question at the top of this essay, I needed to wrestle with it. What does your body tell you about how to negotiate an unreasonable world?

Look to whatever has been ignored, underestimated, omitted.

In unstable periods, when the pendulum is swinging wide, far, and high, equilibrium is found by pulling in the opposite direction.  Sometimes the most grounding maneuvers we can make are compensatory, counterbalancing the collective lopsidedness. Look to what has been devalued, head in the direction that others are moving fast away from.

Bring ideas, methods, and lives that have been pressed to the margins toward the center.

The solutions, if there are any, are often in the last place anyone looks.

Stop thinking of death as a failure and longevity as reward for virtue

Forge a reasonable, psychological relationship with death. Work to consider death as natural and inevitable. Understand that aspirations and illusions of immortality are grandiose and damaging to the earth, and to other lives and species.

Not all of us will make it through this compound crisis. Some of us have already and will die sooner because of our civilizational and systemic failures and oppressions. When we talk about “privilege” it is, at its core, the hoarding of resources that allows a small group to live longer at the expense of shortening the lives of others.

Learn to live alongside death and cherish your life along with it.

Hang onto humility in the face of your injuries

Pain and suffering can be ego-inflating, as strange as that may sound. Pain can tell us that our suffering, our discomfort, our wound is the only and the most important wound in the world. It can seal us off from a community of others who suffer differently, in ways that our own pain makes it difficult for us to acknowledge.

If my pain is the worst in the world, it means that others are obligated to assist me, but it also means that I am exempt from helping anyone else. No matter how challenging our circumstances there are almost always many others who are suffering similarly, comparably, or more.

Reject emotional economies that tell us that only one person can get what they need and only at the expense of others. Devise methods that care for your own needs and others simultaneously.

Make space for healthy fear

Fear will necessarily become more present in our lives, whether we collapse into autocracy or our systemic safety nets and institutions simply begin to buckle under the strain.

Relish moments of safety and rest but understand that safety is not a fixed state in any natural environment. Animals in the wild live with a constant level of fear as their ally.

What is that sound? What is that moving on the horizon?  Healthy fear is self and other preserving.

In the days after the World Trade Center fell, I called my father-in-law   - who had fled to the mountains and fought with the partisans as a young teenager when the Nazis invaded Greece -  and told him I was afraid.

“Of course, you are” he said.  “Fear is perfectly natural. Fear keeps us alive when we are in danger.”

Unhealthy fear is fretful, delayed, cloying, diffuse, unable to be funneled into any generative or protective action. Healthy fear may be viscerally unpleasant, but its sacred function is to help preserve us and those we love and care for.

Find your people and cherish them.

Find, build community, create sanity pods, in any way you are able and can tolerate.

Many people wisely recommend that those communities, networks, groups, be as local as possible. But for many people, for a variety of reasons, our community of proximity is not a place where safety and solidarity are readily available.

Find your people, however, wherever, in real life or online. Mutual aid groups, political action groups, social justice organizations. Bowling teams, hobby clubs, reading groups houses of worship. Cast wide nets. You may have to try many on for size.

Celebrate your inner circle however small it may be. Adore them. Dote on them. Enjoy them.

Locate your call.

Consider that you are here for a reason. If you don’t believe that reason is inherent, karmically, or divinely assigned, then choose your own. Whether you create, discover, or obey your call, find it now. It may change or shift over time. That is fine. Locate your core purposes, however fluid they may be.

These questions might help or not: What at the end of your life will you be proud of? What hill are you willing to die on? Where is your line in the sand? What do you hope to nurture or protect, build, or grow? What small seeds can you plant, scatter in the soil, that you will be pleased to find out have grown, whether you personally get to reap the fruits or not? What passions sit on your heart? What do you have to give? What do you hope will emerge down the causal chain from your initiating gestures?

It needn’t be grandiose or heroic. What small, healing, generative gestures can you perform consistently for a time, allowing their impact to accumulate slowly, incrementally?

Pray your head off.

I’m not even sure I believe in God or prayer, but I pray anyway. A nearly consistent prayer rolls through the back of my brain all day long, and all night in the semi-conscious moments between deep sleep. While I work, cook, run errands, write, study, walk, and pick up dog shit off the driveway I feel my heart crying out to whatever is larger than me, than all of us, asking for Something, or Nothing, or Everything to have mercy on me, and to have mercy on us all.

Does it do anything out in the world for me or for others?  I have no idea.

I only know that it keeps my fearful, impermanent, mournful heart alive and able to keep loving this broken, terrifying world.