Photo by Olena Bohovyk on Pexels
Hey everybody,
I’m picturing you as you were this morning, making your tea or coffee, staring out the window at your particular fall weather. I see you, perhaps already engrossed in your to do lists, or scrolling the unread texts that came in as you slept—or tossed—and I wonder how you are on this day, which is a demarcation, a day before a change day.
I wonder how many times in the last week, or month, you were told that the people you love, who are already being harmed, will be more harmed in the future. I think of the photographs you’ve been shown of other people, and how you’ve been told those people wish you weren’t here and want to erase your history from our collective story. Told they believe how you look isn’t normal, and that what you love doesn’t matter. You’d been warned to have a plan because danger is coming, it’s on the horizon, and the face of the other is what it looks like.
I wonder how you’re doing and if you’re tamping your feelings down so you can go to work, or to the grocery store, because you’re supposed to act like none of this is happening, and at the same time, like it’s the only thing that matters.
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.
The mind leaps so easily into a catastrophic future. Threat creates contraction. The more we contract, the more suspicion feels like rationality, and defensiveness like courage.
The ideological systems that form the network of late stage capitalism are those steeped in hierarchy and structural violence. The way ideology works is a lot like the way speculative reporting works—it puts forth a fiction as if it were a truth, and then recirculates that truth, dominating and extinguishing any narrative that would call into question its version of reality.
Asking us to contest and frustrate that network with its own, lauded tools—thinking, rationality, dominance, control—ensnares us in the hope that if we just keep fighting the way we always have, we’ll interrupt its power. It’s not that rationality is inherently problematic; it’s just that this kind of thinking is the most “of” the system that’s working so hard to pretend it’s not cratering.
If we use rationality as our source for creating change, we’ll stay inside the very culture that sees “thinking” as the way forward, and that looks for objectivity and dispassionate conversation as evidence that we’re finding truth.
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’m picturing you today because I am angry that you are being told the best use of your creativity and power is to defend yourself from others. I fear that if we all take this as true, if we start telling each other that our energy is best spent keeping things as they are from further falling apart, that I and the rest of us will be robbed of the beauty of what you stand for, where you come from, how you know, and what you bring to the change.
I’m writing to say I hope you won’t let others make pictures in your mind of people you don’t know, and of threats that haven’t arrived yet. I want to use my energy to be present to my own smallness, my tiny, whining, feral self, so that I can coax it forward into the unknowing. I want to drop into my gut and ask what I can find that doesn’t yet have words, or even sound.
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
The Consequences of Speculation