Upside down

I just had an extensive session at my dentist. 3.5hours to prepare my tooth for a crown. For the very first time in my longstanding career as a dental patient, I filled the time open-mouthed listening to podcasts. And they (all 3 of them) were worth the discomfort.

One in particular makes me think. It’s an excerpt of one of Charles Eisenstein’s community calls (which I regularly attend as well), “The election may not mean what any of us think”. In his very own articluateness and meticulousness, Charles describes so in-depth the situation we as humanity find ourselves in.

Very few of us actually know what is going on and where it is leading and everyone who has thought they do (me included) is receiving harder or softer nudges that concepts, incidents or people aren’t what they seemed to have been.

It’s this way whether you look at Donald Trump, Joe Biden, the Ukraine war, Corona or climate change. Things are changing so quickly, the nuances of each of these issues/people are so manifold that it can easily get overwhelming.

Over the last few years, I have changed from a more or less convinced leftist liberal to someone who is no longer relating to myself and others in the way of socio-political classifications. A period of cognitive dissonance in which my state of mind consistently alternated between either “I’m totally off” or “they are”, as painful as it was, has helped me to see through the assumption that people, groups, or narratives are as rigid as I’d like to believe for my own sense of safety.

We’re certainly in a period of time in which many of us realize that we cannot continue like that: strictly believing and acting according to what others do, like, or approve of, whether they’re peers or so-called “elites”. The ensuing or accompanying sense of inner hollowness is too painful and obviously pointless.

However, very few of us know (and unfortunately I don’t know anyone) where this will lead us, except for eventually, if you’re an optimist or as William Ury likes to frame it a ‘possibilist’, our universal freedom.

On the way to that there is a lot to learn and to develop: above all openness that can be bodily felt. The experience to keep an open heart (chest) to ideas, opinions (which are always pointing to needs!), and narratives that we reject. To allow for our brains to be so permeable that we can see the wrong assumptions that our own narratives hold, and to accept that what we deem condemnable has many many nuances, some of them we can even empathize with.

While we’re facing extreme complexity, this is also the opportunity for us to break free of what limits us both as individuals and as humanity: our assumptions, interpretations, beliefs, that we hold dear as our supposed identity.

I’ll never assume or suggest that this is an easy task. I myself struggle with it on a daily basis both in my closest relationships and in observing the world at large. Indeed, there is very few other ways to go and most definitely beneficial to ask for support in holding and dismantling the anxieties that inevitably pop up.

Be kind to yourself. Be kind to your inner parts that feel triggered, alarmed, withdrawing, angry, and anxious. It doesn’t all make sense to them but on a greater and deeper level it very much does to you.