A slow reflection in a fast moment

Slowing down might help us unlock the creativity and the kindness we desperately need right now.

In a moment of intense uncertainty, I am preparing for an annual journey off the grid. Interesting timing. There are serious urgencies and imperatives to the current state of the Democratic presidential nomination. But there are also fundamental questions about how we ended up here and where we are going (or wish we were going) at work that ought to inform how we choose to what to do next.

When I am scared especially in wildly uncertain environments and moments like this one, when predicting outcomes feels both impossible and essential, I seek specificity and increasingly declarative definitive opinions. I, like many people, turn to manufactured certitude for comfort and safety. Just as precarity is unevenly distributed in society, so is safety. And the things and situations we might consider safe differ wildly from person to person and community to community. But regardless of our privileges and relationships to risk and safety, that false certitude only provides the illusion of safety. It is comforting but ultimately blinds me to my real circumstances and my actual precarities, leaving me open to even worse outcomes and manipulations — and ultimately to the actual opportunities that might also be present as well.

When I wrap ourselves in this kind of absolutist false certainty, I close myself off to understanding and empathy — even to others, to my communities (much less those outside my inner circles who may begin to appear to me as enemies). But perhaps even more importantly (and dangerously) I cut myself off from our own creativity. I lose the ability to engage with novelty in alternative ideas with anything approaching openness because it undermines the safety of my certainty. New ideas, new paths, and new ways forward threaten that certainty and so are either discarded unexamined or greeted as threats. So in moments like this, I need to first manage that fear, find quiet and perspective enough to feel safe enough that I can strive to stay open to the possibilities amidst the challenges, stay connected to my communities, and open to the ideas and the creativity they might inspire in me — and that I might inspire in them.

For today, while hopefully most of you rest and reflect, I offer some thoughts from this time each of the last few years in the hopes of injecting some longer-term, bigger-picture perspective into how we greet this moment, how we hold onto our empathy and creativity and act with kindness and curiosity in a moment of high stakes and diffuse, but acute fear.

From Spring 2024: What if the means determine the ends?

From Spring 2023: Spirit, Heart, Head, Hands

From Spring 2022: Back from the wilderness

From Spring 2021: What comes from a month off the grid?

There is a path that we actually want, that feeds us and inspires us and draws together a broad, diverse, creative, powerful community — that path is always available, right in front of us. How we turn toward it might determine whether we can see what we need and choose the right one, whether we can harness the creativity and kindness to turn a moment of uncertainty into a moment of generativity and transformation and joy.

Much more to come.

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