The old fortune-cookie curse goes, "May you live in interesting times," and what an interesting time indeed it is for our Procasti-Nation.
The thing about being an American(and at this stage maybe just being part of the modern world) is that the clock starts running as soon as you take that first breath. Open your eyes for the first time in air, and you're blasted with harsh synthetic light, rushed from the first moment. Out of mama, scrubbed clean, thrown in a warmer, shot full of vitamins and whatever else, and wrapped like a to-go order. In the better hospitals you're right back to mom for bonding time, and you'll ideally get a good helping of that. Blink and you're 1, 2, 3. Crawling, walking, talking, and being nudged toward the next steps on the road. Preschool preps you for kindergarten, grade school for high school, college for life and career, or so the story goes. Then you're on the treadmill until it's time to lie down forever; and that's life, that's normal.
You catch yourself looking around to see if everyone's really doing this. You internalize the question and wonder what's wrong with you, for you don't love the fish-tank and you still daydream about open water. The layers of shame pile up and weigh down. You find yourself always a little tired, always a little grouchy, and no matter what, just unsatisfied enough to keep you tethered to what you constantly reassure yourself is a temporary depression. It's not that you aren't grateful. Indeed if you pause to reflect you see that you have so much going for you. Even if you don't have what you want, you likely have what you need. But how you punish yourself for this, when you remember how many do not!
Empathy has become recently celebrated (and will no doubt be plasticized and made a commodity any second now) but while it is a beautiful quality for humans to have, it is also a path of exhaustion. So you're emotionally drained by the state of things because you feel that stark inequality and see it around you, and you are sickened by the costs paid by the planet for the way humans choose to live. You're physically exhausted because your eternal moment has been sliced and diced into days and then hours and then minutes. You're mentally exhausted because even the seconds are being colonized by the constant buzzing and bells of that ravenous little portal in your pocket. You're spiritually exhausted because giving up infinity to play at being human hurts in a way language will never touch. Some say it's all part of a plan unknown to us, or that we all chose this and forgot on purpose to make it mean something.
If we didn't choose this, if we are children of chaos rather than divinity, then we're just HERE. Ever at the grindstone, constantly sharpening a knife edge that we also have to walk on. It's no wonder there's such a fortune in selling people ways to be number and dumber. But I don't believe we're the victims of a blind universe, indifferent though it may be to our microcosmic movies. We are dramatic creatures, and as Shakespeare said, the world IS a stage. We're all acting, we're all "doing a bit," we're all living out scripts. But who's the author, who's the director, and why do we keep remaking the classics of cringe?
Listen, it's okay that we live out stories, that we put on plays. but we're so damned good at it that what we pretend becomes real. If that sounds crazy, think about what you talked about 3 years ago and see if it turned up yet. I'll bet it has. You and I are helping make the world every day with who we are and what we allow in it. That's a true responsibility and we are not acting in our best interest at all. A play? Sure, let's do the Greatest Show on Infinite Earths, but let's get picky, and fast. This performance doesn't have to be the Grand Guignol. We don’t have to keep writing new versions of the Trauma Sutra.
Humans have a problem: We worship toil. Work is one thing, work is holy in its way because it allows us to give of ourselves to create a better place for ourselves and all. But like so many times before, we have formed a cult around a false idol: work for its own sake. Work as virtue, sacrifice as sacrament. Oh, how we love to be slaves. We talk a good game but we line up with wrists out for handcuffs every time the going gets rough these days. Oh, that Adversary works constantly at slipping bitters in the honey and casting shadows with its puppets. We tolerate it, we expect it, we cooperate with it. We even seek it when there's a lapse.
We just can't seem to break up with the worst parts of society or their internal counterparts, or the people this discrepancy attracts to us. The fair weather friends who never quite say a good word, the judgmental family, the toxic boss, the partner that eats you like a trigger buffet, these all go unchallenged until we're fed up enough to act. On a grand scale, it's time for us to do the same, but we are so very lazy, so afraid to take the chance on a better world.
So, like a benevolent parent who knows the best things for you need to seem like your idea to get done, Nature, or God, or the universe, or whatever gets the job done for you, has really done us a solid via COVID-19. Are people dying? Absolutely. Are the various arms of the government failing to meet the needs of the people? Of course, that ‘s what they do here. If they could that, they'd be out of a job already, but that's beside the point.
Since we're talking of being on stage, here's a poem for you: Roses are red, violets are blue, governments don't give a damn about you. Government is not there to be a surrogate father or a counterfeit savior. It is, at best, there to keep us just enough alive to stay in line so that The Show goes on and The House gets paid. The show hasn't stopped for centuries, and the monotony has ground our brains to paste. We say the lines but we yearn to improvise. It gets old and it hurts but it doesn't have to hurt all the time. The trick to getting through the play on the Main Stage is to sneak into the audience once in a while and really watch. After a while you start to notice little glitches in the illusion. You see the cue cards, the mic booms, the fact that life is simultaneously a tragedy and a comedy from different angles, which informs your empathy while it restores your humor. We're used to consuming, convinced it's what we're here for. We're used to watching, eyes glazed, jaw slack, spine deformed, blood pooling. But we are called from backstage to act! You're here to perform, my friend, a star among stars. Now act like it, before the reaper's rusting vaudeville hook comes to take you back to the costume department.
In this particular, peculiar moment that some have coined The Great Pause, you've got a chance to slip backstage and try on some new outfits without the usual risk. See, the big machine has parked and the engine is idling. The treadmill isn't budging. You can hop off and go your own way for a while. See the sights, but see them for yourself this time. Get your shoes dirty, get a little color. Listen to the sounds of nature returning. Whether you do this literally or metaphorically, take a notebook on the journey and start writing your own script again. You're going to need it. The projectors are broken, and the writers have been furloughed. The Old Show ain't coming back. The one thing I can agree with the "elite" on is this: crisis is opportunity. They have their ways of taking advantage, but now it's your turn.
It's as if the world finally got tired of waiting for us, and put the emergency brake on this runaway train at last. The situation seems to say, "Okay, that ten thousand years didn't work! So now what?" On a collective level we're being asked to finally re-think the status quo before it becomes our epitaph. We're being challenged to dissect and reassemble the entire way we live, and it's terrifying, but it's also exactly what we need. We always say, "it has to get worse before it gets better," and look, it sure did. Does it need to get even worse? Do we need blackened skies, nuclear rivers and roving gangs of cannibals before it feels like time to change the game? Does half the world have to die of preventable disease, endure preventable poverty, suffer preventable pain until the last terrible instant, because we just can't stay away from our old roles? Let's say no, and let's start from where we are right now.
A ways back I mentioned an episode of The Twilight Zone called "Time Enough at Last." In it, our hero for the hour is a man who simply never seems to be allowed to do the simple thing that gives him pleasure. For him, it's reading. Everywhere he goes, the second he cracks open a book he's chased out as if he'd exposed himself, and in a way, perhaps that's exactly why he was chased out. He is absolutely hounded because he'd rather give some of his time and attention to ideas and imagination than work the levers of the machinery worshiped by those around him. In the end, he secludes, in a bank vault of all places, and later emerges to find himself the sole survivor of a nuclear attack.
After the initial shock of wandering through ruins and finding that his temporary seclusion has become permanent isolation, he grieves, and then adapts. Once he's got the hang of surviving, he happens upon a library. He finally has the time to read. Now because it's The Twilight Zone, there is then an immediate and horrible turn of events. His coke-bottle glasses fall and break just as he's about the dive in to his pile of books. He has all the time in the world, but has lost the agency to do his truest will. Now all he has left is the struggle to go on, but the meaning has been taken from him. This is where I caution you, for while some number of us are still traveling between our sanctuaries and the world that needs our service, many more of us suddenly have "time at last." The great majority of the world is sheltering-in-place, by choice like our man in the vault or by force of many kinds for many purposes. I urge you, ask some questions of yourself right now before you re-enter the world.
We too are often told not to do what we are naturally called to, from childhood on. Many, many years ago, the few convinced the many to trade their freedom for a sense of security. In exchange, we got the world you see and all its woe. We opted to act out a grand tragedy so a few people could sit in the opera seats and enjoy our folly. Now the facades are cracked, the foundations are shifting, and we may all be walking among ruins soon enough. What then will we spend the time on? What world will we build from the bones of this one? But more to the point: What are you doing with this furlough, this firing, this quarantine? What have you been putting off all day, all week, all year, this entire life?
Did you worry what people would say if they saw you? With full respect, to hell with what they'd say. Now they're stuck too, given the same chance to re-cast themselves that you have. Don't worry if they're too invested in their characters to think about a new way to act. Don’t worry if they’re jealous of your new lines, your better role. You've got your own corner of the stage to rehearse in until you're ready to find the spotlight. What will you do with your debut?
You can't wait for “next time,” this time. We may not have a "next time" in us, so it's now or perhaps indeed never. The Adversary and the Control Grid have already figured out how to spin this into getting what they want from you, but what do you want from yourself? The more of us who can answer that and move toward it, the less of us will be available as fuel and food for the Hollow-gram. There are people in those death machines too, of course, as caught up in this as any of us, perhaps full of regret as their castles crumble. May they too be liberated.
For myself, I'm learning to make the most of what's available and share. We're all stuck at home part or full time, and it's our duty, in addition to keeping the home front running, to become amateur alchemists turning old obstacles into new gateways. The time exists to plant and tend the garden, to clean the house, to rebuild the multi-studio and push it into production. The time exists to restore this haggard body to health, to rediscover the spirit, and yes to read the books I collected for "someday." Someday is here, waiting for you break trance. All the energy spent on surviving the "grind" and "hustle" can be put back into making ourselves more perfect instruments of service. All the time we had to give away is now freed to be shared with those we love and whose who need love in these dark days. We have not been operating at capacity, we have been operating under duress. Energy is not destroyed, but in this incredible and unprecedented moment, it can finally be redistributed.
We have many choices to make as a world, and as individuals, but it comes down to finally choosing to live instead of survive. As a bumper sticker I once saw says:
“Life after death? WHY WAIT?"
We have all promised to make the time for so many things that would feed us and each other, if we only had the chance, but we kept disqualifying the moment as insufficient. We kept giving the parasite permission to starve us. We let the perfect choke the good, and now, it's not up to us anymore. The time has arrived. What will we make of it? I'll leave you with that question. I'd love to hear what you're doing with this opportunity but I insist: answer with your works, not just your words. Consider the children being born at home in this moment, freed of at least the beginning of the programming that traps us in the failing and fading punch-clock world. You too, perhaps, are being born again. May your find your way back to who you really are, and give that gift to us now,, when we need it most. Happy resurrection!