Resilience, or grace
I have to say that I'm feeling embittered and angry and frustrated and despondent and exhausted and bewildered and deeply worried. I also have to say that I'm having great difficulty understanding how anyone else cannot feel this same profound disquiet. In many ways, both real and imagined, it feels like we're living in the prelude to utterly dark times. Our American democratic government is on the brink of cozing up to a totalitarian Russian regime and placing our national security and fate in the hands of someone who has demonstrated a complete lack of restraint, ethics and sense of responsibility to his fellow citizen while conservative white Christian America looks on or looks away because their winning political party is making good on its promises to strip women, LGBTQI people, Muslims, and people without means but in need of healthcare of their human rights and deepen the fathomless pockets of the wealthy--which is apparently required to make America great. I do not know where the common ground is on which to build a better nation for all.
Uncomfortable topics. It's hard to talk about, but we're supposed to do it anyway because what else can we do? Lately though, I've been tired of the burden of being the personal face of humanity for someone who would rather ignore it, being the inspiration for their compassion or willingness to consider lives different from their own. It is not fair that I'm expected to do the work to make the uncomfortable palatable for the privileged in order to have any dialogue at all. But I'm not supposed to say that. Or maybe all this has already been considered but deemed inconsequential. So perhaps we are already in dark times, always have been.
I really don't know about the moral arc of the universe and its bent.
I tell Louie all the time that he can't always have his way nor is he supposed to, and he must learn to deal with it, that we can focus on the good things that we have in order to put the bad things in the right perspective. He still cries and cries about it. I tell him that it's okay to cry, but it doesn't change anything. And he cries and cries. And it is hard to bear and hard to know what lesson I'm trying to teach or what the point was or where my own anger at it is actually coming from.
Eventually it passes, as I know it will, as Louie and Darren will learn too. We are already moving on to the next teachable moment. And we will have no idea if we're building anything worthwhile until much much much MUCH later.
Uncomfortable topics. It's hard to talk about, but we're supposed to do it anyway because what else can we do? Lately though, I've been tired of the burden of being the personal face of humanity for someone who would rather ignore it, being the inspiration for their compassion or willingness to consider lives different from their own. It is not fair that I'm expected to do the work to make the uncomfortable palatable for the privileged in order to have any dialogue at all. But I'm not supposed to say that. Or maybe all this has already been considered but deemed inconsequential. So perhaps we are already in dark times, always have been.
I really don't know about the moral arc of the universe and its bent.
I tell Louie all the time that he can't always have his way nor is he supposed to, and he must learn to deal with it, that we can focus on the good things that we have in order to put the bad things in the right perspective. He still cries and cries about it. I tell him that it's okay to cry, but it doesn't change anything. And he cries and cries. And it is hard to bear and hard to know what lesson I'm trying to teach or what the point was or where my own anger at it is actually coming from.
Eventually it passes, as I know it will, as Louie and Darren will learn too. We are already moving on to the next teachable moment. And we will have no idea if we're building anything worthwhile until much much much MUCH later.
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