* What is the psychic toll of being in a state of perpetual anticipation of a threat?
* How does it feel in the body when we behave as if we aren’t in hyper arousal, when we play at rationality and calm, even as we’re consuming information designed to evoke a strong emotional response?
* How might sustaining this level of contradiction keep us off balance, out of contact with our own known truths, make us vulnerable to others’ stories?
* How can we access our creativity, which is rooted in our intuition and embodied sensations, if we are being told to concentrate on overcoming an imminent threat?
The problem with speculation is that it is a falsity, masquerading as a truth. And when that speculation is attached to an authority—a newspaper, a TV broadcast—it’s even more difficult to slow down and untangle what is anticipated from what is known.
What would happen if we could stop asking a world view that got us here to show us how to escape? Instead of being seduced by speculation, I wonder what it would be like to sit with what is actually known: that there have always been other sources of knowledge, other practices of attuning, and that there is urgent communication from the entire ecosystem that we must hear. Just inhabiting our not-knowing, and making room for the feelings that show up, is work that could help us slow down.
Part of what is so challenging about this moment is its two-ness: how we are daily told to shore up the systems that organize the current power structures, even as it is clear that increasing numbers of people want to engage in a process of emergent and fundamentally transformative change. Almost everyone I know who has chosen to engage in this kind of change work is doing it on double time—for free, around the edges of paid work, exhausting themselves, trying to stay uplifted, trying to find more time, more energy, more sustenance, because they have one foot in the future and one foot in the now.
I won’t hand my imagination to those who say we can’t make it across the threshold. I want to sit in the vastness of what is emerging. I want you sitting beside me, breathing, dropping into the wellspring of your power. I want my body to love uncertainty and eschew fixity. I want this to be a new kind of safety. I want to practice this, together.
Rebecca
