Make Mine a Double
This has been a year of choices – from choosing candidates to responding to Covid, from sifting through news to sifting through sources of news, from facing the addictive seductions of self-medication (that come in too many forms to even begin to name) to conscious, loving self-care – there hasn’t been a shortage, that’s for sure…
I talk a lot about conscious adulthood – the (relatively rare) empowered state of being aware of, present to and responsible for one’s wholeness, warts and all – and the practices and disciplines of getting there and, on a good day at least, staying there.
I’m going to be Mr. Obvious here for a moment…
We’re in a funky space in an equally funky time in history.
And if your own inner-adolescent just rolled their eyes as if to say, “Yeah duh, whatever…”, well, hang with me for a bit…
Any time choices show up, there’s the possibility of heading in directions that could be considered more responsible or, of course, less.
One could choose to move in ways that facilitate learning more about one’s self, one’s relationships to others and/or one’s connection to the larger systems of their communities, institutions and world…
One could also choose to move toward the more constricting, divisive side of the personal, interpersonal and worldview continuum where tired dogma, easy answers, endless spinning and never-ending conspiracy theories live…
On one hand, choices are not always so binary in nature.
On the other hand, it seems as if many of the choices rolling our way right now are starkly up or down, dark or light, nurturing or damaging, connecting or separating.
It also feels – and I use that language intentionally – as if part of what’s going on is the thrashing, rattling last breaths of systems and ways of being that can no longer support themselves under their own weight and can no longer breathe without the aid of supplemental oxygen…
And, though the writing is clearly on the wall, they’re fighting madly to hang on.
Some of the hallmarks of those old, dying ways include refusal of facts, denial of science, a dogmatic rejection of expertise, unwillingness to dare utter “I don’t know”, fear of somehow being replaced or otherwise sucked under by waves of “other” and, of course, an absolute terror of the unknown.
In the big spiritual picture, it’s desperate grasping and attachment on steroids.
In smaller snippets, it creates separation and loneliness, often accompanied by the righteous resistance to real connection.
The challenge – for me at least – is not to get seduced into fighting fire with fire. It is, in fact, not to get seduced into any fighting at all…
Because fighting is so, so tempting…
Personally, that fighting can come in the form of doom-scrolling, of pouring myself into busy work, of flying off on flights of fancy in which I brilliantly smack-down or irrefutably “own” another in my own self-righteous, holier-than-thou social media kind of way…
As if that choice would elevate the conversation, change one single mind or otherwise solve anything.
Because if I’m at all honest with myself, most of the fight would be with myself – and any outwardly facing battle would only be a not-so-cleverly disguised war against a disowned, marginalized part of myself.
It would be the ego-driven equivalent of drinking myself under the table whilst announcing that I’m sobering up…
Thanks Barkeep. Make mine a double, will ya…?
Some choice that would be…
And that brings it all right back home, between the eyes of that bald man in the mirror…
Because if I’m not making the on-going choice to do my own work, I don’t have much of a leg to stand on.
How about you?
What are you choosing?