War No More
It unravels. It falls apart. It erupts. It implodes and explodes.
The world floods and burns at once. A disabling and deadly virus is left to tear through the populace unrestrained. Elders and babies are murdered. Authoritarians and oligarchs bask in their power, indulge their whims, while so many die and suffer.
There are calls to fight on many fronts. And many rise up and look for a place to engage in the battle. Fighting is framed as an essential process, the required stance. The solution to our suffering is to win, and to lose is to suffer.
I fought a lot, for a long time. Too many battles on too many fronts to even bother to list. I marched and mobilized, and held the line, and defended and attacked when necessary. But at some point, I stopped fighting. It wasn’t really a choice. The fighting stopped within me.
I can’t fight battles, I couldn’t “resist!” I became incapable of operating on battle lines. Its not that I have any confusion about where I stand, or where my values lie in any social conflict. I know, if I have to join in this competition who I would want to win. I’ve played the game. I still am lured into the fight sometimes but it drains me so quickly and thoroughly that all fighting gestures become futile.
And I get that it is life and death. It is literally my life too. But I tell you as much as I love living, I don’t want to even “fight” for that anymore. I don’t want to win my life. I want to love it. I want to live it until it ends.
Listen, I watched my mother and a chosen sister “lose their long battles with cancer” as the media and obituaries so often say. And I know they didn’t lose at anything. They didn’t “fail” to live. Death isn’t a failure. The dead don’t “lose” at anything, even when their deaths arrived prematurely, unnecessarily, or sadistically. They may be lost to us, but they did not lose.
Life isn’t a game or a war.
War is all we seem to be able make out of Life.
I knew the moment that I was diagnosed with cancer that I was not going to fight it. How could I? They were my very own cells, over activated, over-producing, gone haywire. I needed to treat them, embrace them, tend to them, prune them back, settle them down, call them back into their proper place and function. I thought about the ways that I was complicit in their over-extension, all the ways these berserk cells operated in my body exactly as I had operated in the world.
And I came to know, for myself, in my own life, in my bones (and I mean to tell no one else how to survive or what to choose) that fighting pathologies fuels them. That fighting for survival is damaging.
The fight was gone. This was very distressing to many comrades I had fought alongside for many years in various ways. I left the field. I quit the game. Again, this doesn’t mean I don’t see the problems, that I am untouched by them, or that I accept oppression or endorse cruelties. Maybe it just means I am too old, damaged and battle scarred to fight anymore. But when the fight left, it opened a whole world of responses to realities I had never allowed myself to look at before.
The healing that can emerge from surrender, or from the refusal to fight. The need to actively tend to the wounded, the damaged, those that are falling and have fallen. The need for rituals and markers and commemoration and the integration into memory of those who are gone. The importance of endings and decomposition. I stand on the same battle lines I suppose, but facing the other way: I look at the wake we leave behind in our fights, and wonder if there is another strategy for healing other than dominating dominance. What if we can only “win” by truly accepting our losses, what we have lost, what we will lose? What if the only path forward isn’t in fighting against loss but by lifting up all we have lost? By calling on our dead?
Maybe there is more than one way to try to grow more of what we value. Maybe some need to immerse ourselves, focus steadily on the decay and grow new things from it? Maybe in and down, slow, small, dark, quiet and under are pathways that are as legitimate and effective as up and out, strong, big and loud, above and beyond, all or nothing, stand and fight?
I don’t write any of this to deter those engaged in battle. Fighting may well be an absolute necessity. But not all of us can do it. And not forever. It is not the only sacred work that can be done in the face of destruction, damage, oppression, cruelty.
Some will need to look back. Pull in. Bury the dead. Tend to those that have fallen. Mark and memorialize all our losses and our lost and then lift that up in itself as a holy cause.
