The World We Want

I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves – we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other’s destiny.

-Mary Oliver

These beautiful words of the poet Mary Oliver have been on my mind as I try, like everyone else, to wrap my head around what is happening to the world. They remind me that while I am  confined within my home, the links remain unbreakable. These links become, in this crisis, more apparent than ever.

I am a bore in the ways that I drone on about those few things that I find absolutely fundamental and one of those things, as the people who visit me regularly will know, is that we are what we are only in relationship. There is no such thing as an individual without ties, and those ties are not secondary to some integral and isolated self but constitute the most basic fabric of the self. To develop and grow as an individual is to develop and grow in ones relationships, with others both human and extra-human, with the natural world, within our communities.

Mary Oliver’s words remind me that this crisis is a time to remember that and to feel it more concretely in every moment of my day, and it is also a reminder to not rush too quickly into establishing a new normal, but to take the time to recognize that everything now is transforming, and that this transformation of each of us and of all of our systems of interconnection provides an astonishing kind of opening within which we might springboard the hoped-for changes that have remained mute in the daily habits that keep us dull and preoccupied. Hegel describes habit as “tensionless activity”; it’s going through the motions of being alive while having nothing against which to struggle and nothing towards which we might aspire, aspiration itself implying struggle. Now that the veil of habit has been pierced, now that quotidian preoccupations have been cleared away, we have a better view of the whole. By the whole I don’t mean any unified vision or any one truth in some mystical sense, but simply an orientation for things that are farther away, a concern for bigger things like the shape of a whole life, what we are adding up to with our daily activities, or the structure of our communities, the future of our planet.

I am a little hesitant to talk about these things because of the very real and very present struggle that many are and many more will face in terms of confronting this disease. It is often seen as a luxury to think philosophically, but the fact is that many of us do have more time right now since what we are doing to contribute to collective well-being is staying at home and not working. And I think that if we fail to take advantage of the current shift in the collective consciousness, a shift that is still just a swirl where things have kicked up but not yet resettled, then when this is over things will settle with much the same framework as before and without our having had a say in how they might be different. And the opportunity, to my mind, is absolutely fundamental because we want a different world.

We want a different world. I commit to this thought, which might seem a reckless over-generalization. But I commit to it both because I have heard it from so many people and because I am convinced that objectively we are living in a very unhealthy way, all of us. Many people who come to see me seem to think that there is something wrong with them, that they are doing something wrong, when in fact – in my view - it is the larger systems in which they participate that leave them no way to thrive. Again the links; we cannot thrive, no matter how much we work on personal development, in an unhealthy environment. And the first thing that is unhealthy in our world is the rampant individualism that is baked into Western thought. The revelation of the unbreakable links could jump-start a genuine revolution against the individualism that has led to a world of injustice, alienation and degradation.

I am going to continue to think and write about this period of transformation and the ways in which we might take advantage of the opportunity to rethink. But for now, I want to leave you with some advice if you are feeling directionless. To begin with, I am personally against this idea that I am seeing everywhere on social media that we ought to use this time to be productive. Not just because I have seen the anxiety that it has produced in many people who are just trying to survive this. Productivity is exactly what many of us have been mercifully released from, and trying to reclaim it as quickly as possible puts us right back into the daily grind that for so long has blinded us to the big picture. Having some kind of structure to a day can be good for mental health, and we should each of us do what we need to do to feel healthy and active. But if you can manage right now to take the time to practice not being productive, this is where things can come alive. Stay away from social media where everyone is posting all their amazing little at-home projects or fabulous crafting ideas or writing a novel or learning a language. I think it’s good to be doing something, but it is true that many of us are experiencing trauma and should not be expected to produce anything.

And if there is mental energy leftover, use it to contemplate. Heidegger points out the difference between calculative thinking, which accepts the world as it is (a fundamentally technological world, in Heidegger’s analysis) and weighs things, in order to figure out how to get somewhere, and meditative or contemplative thinking, which releases us beyond the framework in which we normally remain trapped, allowing us to consider meaning and Being in a more open, intuitive and creative manner. It is this latter that we now have an opportunity to engage in. We have been forced out of our comfortable ways of relying on systems that we take for granted. The gift of that is to see them from the outside for the first time and really consider if the ways our communities and systems are structured are good and healthy ways. The gift is to notice that how these are structured is deeply important to each of us, and is fundamental to any development we might make as individuals. The gift is a chance to think how these structures might be otherwise so that we might be otherwise.

It is in this contemplative mode that we have the opportunity to notice those links of which Mary Oliver speaks. We can feel these links in the way that our hearts break over the deaths of people we have never met, as far away as Italy and China. We can feel them in the way that our neighbours, people we may never even have noticed before, now depend upon us to check in with them, to get food to them or to just spend the time letting them know they’re not alone. We can feel them in the way our economic systems are crumbling all over the world and revealing the ways that we have depended upon people far away without even being aware of it. We can feel them in the way that practicing this strange new thing call social distancing demonstrates faith in our fellow citizens and an awareness of the impact each of us can have upon the collective. We can feel them in the way that our children feel our anxieties wordlessly. We can feel them in the way that we are looking to nature for wisdom more and more, and taking stock of what our business as usual mode has done to nature. We can feel the links between ourselves and others more deeply now that we are forced to be physically distanced from them. Notice those links in your own life, if you can. Meditate on them. Be unproductive and notice that the links do not weaken if you produce less. We are each other’s destiny, says Oliver. With this in mind, I would ask you - what would a better world look like to you?