Life Is Not Always Gentle

Centuries of systemic racism, police brutality and violence, divisiveness, disembodiment, disconnection – and the collective cultural and individual trauma all of this leads to – have brought us to a breaking point. Cities are under curfew. The National Guard has been called in. Tear gas and rubber bullets are being unleashed on peaceful protestors and members of the press. Opportunistic subcultures are seizing the moment to foment more divisiveness, unrest and fear. A pervasively broken culture is revealing itself in the bold light of day.

When it comes to fundamental layers of American culture, such as systemic racism or misogyny, change does not come easily, quietly, or peacefully. If we look to ecology and its ever-unfolding evolution, we see that Life is not always gentle, and systemic change is often violent. Even as it seems clear that Life’s mandate is to continuously create never-before-seen iterations of itself, human culture often becomes invested in its ways of being. In fact, most human culture resists – even violently fighting against – the very change needed for it to thrive.

We cannot possibly know where our current crises will take us. And in this unknown it is often difficult to know what to do next. There are many courses of action to take, and the first one I suggest you take is to feel all that’s happening in you. 

Make space for the shock, the grief, the rage, the hope, the excitement, the relief – or whatever it is that's alive within you. Allow these feelings to move through you. Let them rattle the foundations of any rigid ideas and identities that may have taken up residence in you. Allow them to do their important job of nourishing your responsiveness and adaptability. Don’t push them away. Lean in. The fear of violence. The excitement for change. The shame for not doing more. The freeze of not knowing what to do.

This is one of those, simple but not easy, actions. How do you feel your feelings? Especially when they feel overwhelming? You put aside our cultural attitude that any feelings that are uncomfortable and unpleasant are ‘bad’ and therefore to be avoided, and you resource yourself. 

You feel the ground beneath you. You reach out to a friend. You watch the plants, the birds, the caterpillar, the clouds. You do all of this not to get away from the feelings, but to resource your nervous system so that you can actually feel them more. You resource your nervous system so that you can be in the radical discomfort of being human without turning away.

Here we are embodied, wise, curious, available and at attention. It is from this place that we can lean in and begin to take action, which can look like so many things.

We did not cause the current system of injustice. We are its inheritors. But no one is going to undo it for us. No one is coming to rescue us from it and ourselves. It’s up to us. So dig in. Lean in. Connect. And act. It might not be our fault but it is our responsibility.