Postcard: Tempest
No. 003 - on the nature of conflict and remembering how to see miracles.
Postcard is a weekly curation of things I think are beautiful or interesting. Each postcard will be named after a word and contain something to listen to, something to look at, and something to think about. As this is something new I’m trying, I welcome you to share any thoughts in the comments. Thank you!
Postcard: Tempest
tempest:
(n.) A violent storm of wind, usually accompanied by a downfall of rain, hail, or snow, or by thunder.
(v.) To affect by or as by a tempest; to throw into violent commotion, to agitate violently.
(adj.) tempestuous - Characterized by violent agitation or commotion; turbulent, tumultuous; impetuous, passionate; agitated as by a tempest.
†Meanings from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
Something to listen to:
Why can't each of us in the world ever see
The best things in life are free
Little sounds of laughter, a warm hug, a smile
A kiss from you to me
I fall to my knees
I cry and I cry
Something to look at:
I have been temporarily obsessed with how René Magritte kept painting different variations of the same concept throughout his career... remixing his own ideas and reaching deeper into his bag. I think the results have something to say about both the artistic process and life itself. After all, every day we are remixing and riffing our own lives based on our habits and memories. We can only create what we can focus on.
I wonder where the combination of intention and intuition could take you tomorrow?
Something to think about:
Life is full of conflict.
In times of scarcity, conflicts tend to be rooted around the material: physical resources, land, food. It’s about survival. In times of abundance, our conflicts gravitate towards deeper levels of the spirit and psyche: culture, status, power. These conflicts are more about drawing lines in the sand between who gets to thrive and who gets to merely survive. Many conflicts in modern America seem to be about controlling what other people do or think, as we now live in a country where even poor people have smartphones, refrigerators, and cars. In the span of the past century, the average life expectancy in the United States has increased by around three decades. That’s a lot of extra life, man.
Perhaps it was inevitable that amidst that kind of fundamental shift, our relationship with time and aging would shift alongside it. Each successive generation seems to be moving a little slower through the milestones of maturity. It is sadly not uncommon to see 30-year-old Millennials using words like “adulting” to describe tasks that a 16-year-old from a few decades ago could have completed without invoking the conscious mind at all. Aren’t we meant to become less fearful of responsibility as we age? Shouldn’t the fact that this isn’t happening at scale be cause for serious alarm and cultural introspection?
The transition from childhood to adulthood can be characterized with a single word: forgetfulness. Children, seeing the world in the context that it actually exists, are in a state of perpetual wonder. As we age, though, society and culture happens to us. Direct perception of reality is replaced with something new. Like drywalling over the frame of a house when remodeling, as we grow up we are instructed to apply mediating layers to reality. We are told creation myths about our world using words like “representative democracy” and “the scientific method.” These things are spoken to us in a tone of unimpeachable authority, as if to question them or their place in our worldview-hierarchy at all is a marker of mental retardation.
Somewhere along the way, we forget how to see the world.
More layers are added onto the myth. Our ancestors were bad people. Superstitious, selfish, racist, sexist. Their actions are a sort of secular liberal Original Sin. Something to atone for. The collective prosperity created by the effort, ingenuity, and sacrifices of humanity’s ancestors is A Bad Thing, Actually. Inequality, which as far as I can tell is the default natural state of human beings, is recast as the result of a grand conspiracy. Look, I don’t know about you but I have never met two human beings who were equal in any conceivable sense of the word other than spiritual. I haven’t met two human beings who were equally good at one thing, let alone everything. We live in a world where some people work harder than others, some people are more talented than others, and some people make moronic decisions as a matter of habit. I would not expect to see equal economic results. That, in fact, would be weird and unnatural. Yet people who have never directly participated in the creation of wealth would still tell you that they alone know best how it should be distributed for the greater good. And they would say so with a straight face and not a single shred of self-awareness about the staggering levels of arrogance baked into their proclamations.
As these mediating layers from our default culture are stacked up on top of reality, is it any surprise that so many young people end up adopting a cynical and disenchanted worldview? We tell young people to change the world when they graduate college, yet we have failed to teach them how to even understand the world first. The scale of our cultural and institutional failures in this regard are breathtaking and demand redress.
One of the primary cultural fault lines in America today runs along the division between disenchantment and enchantment. Existing in a state of disenchantment really sucks, and misery loves company just like crabs love keeping each other in the bucket. The disenchanted want you to be disenchanted. The disenchanted need you to be disenchanted. It won’t cure them or actually improve anything for them if they do manage to get you, of course, but the illusion that it might is convincing enough for them to chase it anyways. How unfortunate for them, then, that we truly do live in a world overflowing with enchantment and mystery…
To make the truth your enemy is one of the ultimate forms of self-sabotage. A worldview based on lies is like a dying star, capable of doing nothing but inevitably collapsing in on itself. Do not mistake its last gasp, its final grand flash, as a sign of vitality rather than decay. Falsehoods may look like fireworks as they explode and fizzle, but the show always ends eventually, leaving you with nothing but smoke-filled air and memories of brightness.
I recently finished reading Notes on Shapeshifting by Gabi Abrão (aka sighswoon) and one of her many wonderful passages that struck me was this:
“My present mind only knows pleasure. My present mind believes humans are geniuses, over and over as I’m surrounded by all these inventions - the kettle, the heater, the computer. “Geniuses,” I keep saying. And I’m almost angry, because in some ways I know I’m not supposed to feel that way, but I feel it. I want to scream it. We are all geniuses.”
Truth resonates in the spirit and demands to be expressed. I agree, Gabi—we are all geniuses and the evidence is overwhelming, abundant, existing all around us. Entire empires rose and fell fighting over a fraction of the flavors most people take for granted at their local market. We move water, electricity, and information across time and space on a scale that frankly can only be accurately described using words like “miraculous” or “magic.” We speed across the land riding steel horses and soar through the sky on the backs of carbon fiber birds. How curious it is that we are not supposed to celebrate these everyday miracles in the full spectrum of their naturally occurring glory.
But anything learned can be unlearned. We can remember how to forget, and in doing so, rediscover what it was like to see the world as we did when we were children.
With wonder.
An Affirmation:
You are allowed to believe life and the world are enchanted, full of mystery and magic.
You are allowed to believe life and the world are enchanted, full of mystery and magic.
You are allowed to believe life and the world are enchanted, full of mystery and magic.
So many thoughts in my head after this. The way you write these difficult topics as if it’s just popped into your head will forever amaze me.