launching: life in question
I’ve got an hour before I pick my son up from daycare. Though I’ve done the things to “protect my time,” I’ve got to-do list tickering in the background – text the dog walker, pick up diaper cream, get gas – alongside an ever-running tally of our finances, chores I need to get to, and a mental dialogue about world events that just. won’t. quit.
That’s how life has been for the last few years: too busy to do this thing that feels like my most important outlet - write. For months I’ve been crippled by the task to put this content for this website together. Do people even “do blogs” anymore? Who will read this thing? Who is it for, and better yet, what is it for? Regardless of my many attempts to summarize what we should do to fix the state of the planet, go figure: haven’t checked that box off my to do list.
I’m thinking about what to do with the fact that, as Resmaa Menakem says, we haven’t dealt with the long-lasting effect of colonization, and how the behavior of colonizing ourselves and others lives inside us.
Or how Artificial Intelligence is overarchingly being celebrated as a tool of innovation and underestimated as a tool of perception manipulation and environmental degradation – as tech innovation so often is.
Or how in Canada, we can’t even access the news via Meta platforms and a lot of people say that’s because of “the Liberals,” and not because of the extreme overreach of tech bros that are now changing our political infrastructure.
As I often do when confused, I go to my library for moral support. I pulled Jacqueline Novogratz’s Manifesto for a Moral Revolution down, turned to a page I’ve bookmarked, and read this:
“When we look back on our lives, we construct sense-making narratives of who we are and how we’ve chosen to spend our time. But when we look forward, the path ahead can feel overwhelmingly elusive. Just start, and let the work teach you.”
For decades of my life, “figuring it all out” was of paramount concern. Large swaths of time were dedicated to reading about everything from abolition to quantum physics and piecing together theories. I can admit now, with a heavy dose of humility, that perhaps I don’t have all the answers: and in fact, admitting that’s not the game I’m playing anymore feels like the ultimate fuck you to dominant culture. I’m unlearning perfectionism and taking my life back. I’ve wasted too many years thinking that I was the thing that was broken and needed to be fixed. Not anymore.
As Elizabeth Gilbert says, “perfect is the enemy of good.” So I’m just aiming for good. Done, even, will do.
These days I’m working on my resolve to sit with - actually look at - complex things from every angle possible. Ugly things. Unsummarizable things. Especially-hard-to-hold things. Another quote from the ol’ library that helped me with this one is from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet:
“Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now. Because you would mot be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps, then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
There’s a saying from an old woodsman that the reason most people get lost is because they don’t go far enough. It’s easy to get lost out here without a firm understanding of where I’m trying to go. So, as I keep showing up to let the work teach me, I’m going to keep close to my core belief and use it like a compass when I falter: we belong to each other. Our humanity is inevitably, unavoidably interconnected. We have to begin and begin and begin again, until we can meet there as our starting point, because that’s the conversation I want to have.
How? Who the fuck knows. But that’s where I’m going and I hope you’ll come along.
Thanks for being here.