Inter-connectedness

Mis estimados queridos, My Esteemed Ones: Do not lose heart. We were made for these times. Clarissa Pinkola Estés

I’m noticing a lot of writing about our connectedness in these coronavirus times.

I know I am looking for it. I’m sensitized to be aware of it when I see it.

We know the world won’t be the same again. This will not rebound to business as usual, a modern-day mindset that was and is killing us.

What’s clear in these times is we are deeply connected. Our health, our economy and the environment are inextricably linked across the world.

While we’ve known that for a long time the idea that we don’t collaborate is very strong, strongly attractive. The idea we are self-interested individuals is powerful.

However, we don’t tend to notice the starts of exponential curves—like viruses. Similarly, we’re missing the mindset shifts underway from thinking we’re just individual to entangled and connected.

Below are four pieces illustrating this. Yuval Noah Harari, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Zak Stein and Nick Cave.

Do not lose heart: We were made for these times

Clarissa Pinkola Estés picked the connections delightfully, well before coronavirus, in her 2001 Letter to a young activist during troubled times. She says:

We all have a heritage and history of being gutted, and yet remember this especially … we have also, of necessity, perfected the knack of resurrection. 

 

 

Over and over again we have been the living proof that that which has been exiled, lost, or foundered – can be restored to life again. This is as true and sturdy a prognosis for the destroyed worlds around us as it was for our own once mortally wounded selves.

The whole letter is delightful and speaks, amoung other things, to holding our potentials, hopes and dreams, so we can be part of enabling a better future.

That’s always hard if we think about this as individuals. There’s so much accepted practice that needs to shift. Yet, we really only need a committed few too:

It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good. What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts – adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take “everyone on Earth” to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.

The whole letter is in Moon magazine, here >

The Red Hand Files

Yet, what do we do now? It would be difficult, dangerous and debilitating to lose sight of the immediate. Can we hold the current—today’s and future potentials—simultaneously with caution? Caution around words, opinions and actions?

Nick Cave writes on this and the potentials with great insight. He says, in his March 2020 Red Hand File:

A friend called our new world ‘a ghost ship’ — and maybe she is right. She has recently lost someone dear to her and recognises acutely the premonitory feeling of a world about to be shattered — and that we will need to put ourselves back together again, not only personally, but societally.

 

 

In time we will be given the opportunity to either contract around the old version of ourselves and our world — insular, self-interested and tribalistic — or understand the connectedness and commonality of all humans, everywhere. In isolation, we will be presented with our essence — of what we are personally and what we are as a society.

 

 

We will be asked to decide what we want to preserve about our world and ourselves, and what we want to discard. Eventually these questions will become of acute significance, but they are not for now. Now is a time to listen to those in more informed positions and to follow instructions, as difficult as that may be, as we step into the unprecedented unknowable.

So, as we wash our hands and stay at home it seems spaces for exploring our connectedness are present. There are human common denominators: a need and desire for love, engagement and community—they are essential to our wellbieng personally as well as globally. These may also come to the forefront of how we define ourselves and interelate.

Read Nick Cave’s full letter here >

War in heaven

There’s more than one shift, substantial fractures in the timeline, that are unfolding here, in the here and now.

As Zak Stein beautifully puts it we have arrived at the end of a world. That allows us to start building a new one. Nevertheless, that place between worlds is most uncomfortable. It’s a place for creation and a place of emptiness. Such pieces co-exist in us all at the same time.

Zak says:

I have never been through a civilisation-wide transformation before, and neither have you; we are in uncharted waters together. There is a war taking place in heaven concerning the soul of humanity, and it will be fought in each person’s heart, every day, without rest, and into the foreseeable future.

These are precious moments. We’re getting to chose consciously—for the first time we can be a whole humanity connected and communicating across the entire world—between light and dark paths:

There appears to be no other way to handle the responsibility of the moment than by using it not only as a chance to remake the economy, education, and the medical system, but also as a chance to remake the way choices are made and values prioritised. This moment must be used to become a new kind of person. As personhood itself is changing, so education must also change.

Importantly, this is also a call for the practical. What we can do right now?

We can be with ourselves and help ourselves today. We don’t need to— in fact, it would be good not to—long for the past.

We can help each other hold new spaces and potentials.

We can realize that much can emerge and surprise us positively from all the diverse pieces, divergent pulls and politics, in the world right now.

Read the full Covid-19: A war broke out in heaven here >

After the storm passes

While we know this viral storm will pass the world will never be the same again. That’s always certain but this event is significant and the choices we make now shape the world for years.

That impact is not just on our health system but our politics, culture, assumptions, collective blind-spots and economies.

Yuval Noah Harari sees coronavirus speeding historic process up, transformational impacts:

Entire countries serve as guinea pigs in large-scale social experiments. What happens when everybody works from home and communicates only as a distance? What happens when entire schools and universities go online? In normal times, governments, businesses and educational boards would never agree to conduct such experiments. But these aren’t normal times.

He talks about the important choices, polarities, we face. He sees the first as between totalitarian surveillance and citizen empowerment. And the second between nationalist isolation and global solidarity.

This goes far beyond health. It’s our connected world and ouselves as we collaboratively (there is no individual answer) address problems like this, climate change, poverty and more.

If we choose global solidarity, it will be a victory not only against the coronavirus, but against all future epidermic’s and crises that might sell humankind in the 21st century.

Read the full article, The world after coronovirus here >