Boom, crash, bounce?

A&E—Accident and Emergency—machines, doctor assessment, X-rays, blood… at least there’s nobody yelling clear, no defibrillator or really any drama. I mostly sit-lie there, get as far as a cup of tea, do the rapidly becoming familiar nerve, balance and coordination assessments for the duty night doctor, and I am admitted some hours later. They wheelchair me (not letting me walk) to the ward. The staff keeps apologising, it’s a covid times repurposed Children’s ward. Personally, I’m finding the monkeys swinging from vines and banana pictures on the wall quite darling. 

We have done our assessments too for climate change, biodiversity loss, global injustice and inequity and the poorer outcomes for all that brings—not just the poor. We know about structural racism, more plague/new virus likelihoods (likely), intergenerational collective trauma and far more. We know the issues, dangers, lags in the system. Our diagnostic capability, just like the A&E machines, is superb.

The thing is, if the A&E procedures had found a blood clot in me, stroke or wild infectious signs in my blood they would have piled on in with the treatment. The actions to take on me will be clear. It is highly likely I will agree to such treatment. Similarly, the actions to take on our meta-crises—for our own, family and mass numbers of sentient species survival—are clear. 

One is greater than billions

Why the disconnect? How come we will act to save an individual life yet emergency action is failing all humans? Around climate crises you’ll commonly hear rationales such as ‘it costs too much’, ‘we’re an insignificant contributor to the problem/our actions would not matter’,  ‘technology/human ingenuity will save us in the future’. All of those clearly do not apply to someone in A&E. He’s having a heart attack. Oh, let’s wait until his heart stops and then we can use the defibrillator?!

You’ll notice something in this discussion as well. It is a very technical one, machines, money,  proportion of global greenhouse emissions per country or per person depending on the picture we wish to convey. There’s a healing function—connecting and making sense of ourselves and others—that’s vital here and all too easily not present when we frame these crises.

Humanising

I’m healing a little in the hospital ward bed. They wake me up every couple of hours and my blood pressure is gradually dropping back to what I’d call normal for me (96 over 60 lying down—around 50% lower than it was). By the morning I am really champing to leave. It is snowing outside and beautiful, the staff-nurses are lovely and we’re chatting about animals, farms, near and far away places, being separated from our homes by the plague and pretty many of the sorts of healing conversations that humanise life. Some more conversations, doctors, another machine and I’m out of there before 5pm. It feels like a lifetime ago I left for my local doctor’s surgery yesterday.

By this time, through Friday in recovery, I’m obviously chatting with family all around the world. My family is a transcontinental diaspora, Australia/NZ, north America, Europe. The timezones mean there’s always someone to chat to regardless of the hour. A conversation about seizures with my daughter at 2am. No problem, it’s her 8am.

Such global communications are wild. In what’s to come I’m buoyed by the fact that, in a remote and isolated house, there’s always someone awake—on the other side of the world or across the Atlantic—if I need someone to call the emergency help (no phone service in this house for me). 

Initiation

Our global communications clearly enable a lot more of than this. We’re answering global crises by connecting globally. The very conditions that enable crises—e.g. rapid transcontinental travel spreading plagues and intensifying consumptive production—are fundamentally part of the solutions too. We are a global village yet how can we be initiated into caring for everything? Even knowing we’re connected to it all there can’t be the timely feedback from an entire world, as there could be from a small village, to an individual. Yes, it takes a village, and at the same time alongside this is a recognition it is an unsolvable riddle. Unsolvable riddles need to be embraced to assist us to shift in our own beings and understand ourselves in new ways. See An initiation and a koan here> for more.

Week three!

Saturday to Saturday and I’m very far from a new understanding of myself and the vaccination impacts. Some things are getting better. Some symptoms are getting worse. I spend a significant amount of the week on the floor. It feels less stressful there. Psychologically supported by the carpeted ground. Managing the occasional email, computer joining me on the floor, in 5 minute bursts with an hour or two recovery, or more, afterwards.

The thing is I value and celebrate these bursts. I will continue to try as it makes me feel good. It is so much more than we-I am a social creature. I-we-you are entangled with all around us. In acting to create and co-create a new-meta, a new story through which we make sense of all this and shift beyond old thinking that holds us back, you-I-we are part of generating that reality too. That vibrancy of life is worth far more than the downside crash of another 2 to 5 hours, I’m time-slipping right back into the fever-chill-head/stomach ache-skinrush cycle, after a short piece of effort.

The trouble is—just as we can set aside somewhat the exceptionally challenging global metrics around our crises like climate and racism—I was not really admitting the depth of my current difficulty. By Thursday more tests have been scheduled for the hospital and I feel significantly more limited on day 20 than on day 7. I am getting close, albeit not stepping over this line, to admitting this is getting worse rather than better. Some symptoms are easier, some are stronger and more intense. Am I allowed to have a lack of clarity in that? That’s my thought or excuse anyway…

Friday

Day 21, is mostly spent on the floor. Crying on and off.

The analogy here is with the depth of our world crises. We’re addressing pieces of these dangers while many parts are becoming significantly more challenging as the days go by. I find this to be a despairing and inspiring paradox. For example, who could not stand on the beach in Fiji, marvelling in the beauty of place, people and company while heartbroken on the election of another climate do-nothing-burn-coal government (in Australia). See Hope and disappointment here> Similarly, who can’t watch Dave Chapelle 8:46 here> without crying, being re-appalled and feeling the energy for change

We know a meta-shift is possible, there are multiple visions of a thriving new future and many standout examples where parts of this are being realised. What is clear, however, is gradual change inside more of the same system won’t cut it. 

Gradual change 

Even on day 22 a part of me thinks I am gradually improving. Day 23 is Sunday morning and I did not really feel up to going anywhere. I have expended what seems to be a totally unreasonable amount of energy to do something simple (organises a taxi to the hospital, 90 minutes away, for Monday). Nevertheless, a day inside, while killing me it is so beautifully and sunny outside, does not seem awful. 

By the early afternoon I am on the floor. Again. Around 5 pm I feel a little dizzy, having raised myself onto a seat, and then I have a very intense reaction. This is really like break into your pain centre cramps and such a full-on high-screaming-frequency pile-driving adrenaline rush I am paralysed. 

Sweat is pouring off me. I have my head almost between my legs and can do nothing for the first 20 minutes. I cannot move. I stay sitting for an hour. I do not stand up. Eventually, I take off my t-shirt. It is literally soaked and can be wrung out.

Another hour or so and I email my doctor, from the floor and relatively ok. Chills have set in. I say I am quite lightheaded and I feel like I’m shaking more than I felt like I was shaking before.

Thrombosis

It is the country, isolated and few people are physically close by. Alex replies at midnight. My backup plan has been in place—my beloved in N America, sister in Europe, daughter in Australia. Check. I have 24 hour coverage. With these timezones someone would alway be awake to call Alex (and emergency) for me, if needed.

Happily no emergency call is needed. However, I and the doctors are by this stage concerned. I am forced to admit to myself this is getting worse, not better. In hospital on Monday, after five hours of machines and consultations, we eliminate the potential that this is a thrombosis—the super rare blood clot associated with two of the covid vaccines including the one I had. Of course, I am interested in the mechanism too. It’s believed that the vax can trigger antibodies to form, like an immune response, that then promote clots. See What causes the rare blood clots linked with some covid-19 vaccines here> 

In many ways our actions to address meta-crises, while laudable, do this too. There are numerous examples such as biofuels encouraging agriculture to exploit more and more marginal land. Partly, through the cash price of such fuel feedstock this consequently adds to global warming. Similarly, with the ‘war on terror’ and racism people’s experience in one context can lead to dire consequences in others (see 8:46 above). 

Problems

Vaccination can be problematic especially when we fail to simultaneously address the systemic causes. That’s a call to embrace and assist our thinking pattern shifts alongside addressing the immediate. Yes, let’s take the immunity-promoting options. However, it time to do this individual stuff together with the collective—reconceptualize the systems as well as put out the fires. E.g. see A climate for change here>

As I am writing these final paragraphs it is now day 29. I thought I was going to finish on day 28. I spent the afternoon on the floor instead with a quick trip to what now feels like another universe, another place for a short time in that period too. I’m guessing 5 seconds although when I’m in that it feels more like 15 minutes. Coming back into the room is an experience of a return from a long, multi-week trip somewhere else. I (you and we) remain at least partly in that other place, on a permanently parallel track to what existed before.

Throughout this whole essay there is good in the bad alongside plenty that is confronting and seems unresolvable. To bounce beyond that we need to embody a new paradigm, step into a new way of being together, while celebrating the best of now and the past too. I think we’re doing that and, like my ‘recovery’, it is not straightforward.

To be continued…

I’m tentatively working out the patterns of this—what sends me into a crash. It is not easy. It continues to unpleasantly surprise me but I’m (mostly) cautiously optimistic. 

Fortunately, we know far more about our global meta-crises-crash. We’ve mapped the patterns, the entangled interconnections—we’re putting ourselves into the picture along with our thinking patterns—and we have some awesome answers. These include connecting the extraordinary care and local help I’ve been assisted by, I was a complete stranger here a few months ago, to our global village. This is a source of deep inspiration. And a continuing story.

Simon, morning of 24 and 26 April 2021.