My Quiet Sanctuary To Escape The Frenzy
The sun is streaming through my office window on this quiet weekend morning, bringing with it a promise of renewal. Spring is around the corner. When I close my eyes to savour the moment, I briefly forget about the mayhem out there.
What’s going on with the world?
I haven’t posted much since late last summer. This wasn’t a deliberate choice. In fact, during this time I sat down diligently every day to write, only to find myself tongue-tied after the first paragraph.
The truth is, quite simply, I am struggling to formulate cohesive thoughts lately. My brain is crammed with stimuli coming from all directions. I can hardly bring myself to read the daily news anymore, the novelty of this reality-TV-show-gone-bad long worn off.
Instead, I am left with countless questions about what the mass turmoil means for myself, my family, and the planet at large. I grasp at extracts of wisdom from great thinkers and leaders of another time. My bedside table is stacked with half-finished books and journals filled with notes taken in the hopes of finding a compass to navigate this sea of noise.
In the end I keep circling back to the same basic question: Where do I begin to unpack the complexity of this seismic shift we are living?
Are you so sure?
I marvel at the bravado of a select few out there, seemingly convinced to have all the answers. To believe their rhetoric is to be lulled into thinking that life is as simple as right or wrong, good or evil, and ‘us’ versus ‘them’. If only the answers to the complex issues of our day could be neatly packaged into a 140-character sound bite.
On the other hand, looking The Great Unknown straight in the eye doesn’t necessarily make for fun company. (Just ask hubby who has been my sparring partner in this existential moodiness of late.) The Great Unknown demands a quiet space for reflection; something we are short on in a productivity-obsessed world.
A time for quiet
We all react differently to turmoil. Some folks engage in playground-style bullying to escape the dread. A few seek shelter in the accumulation of power or money. Others take to the streets. As for me, I have temporarily retreated into the comfort of grilled cheese sandwiches and weekend naps.
Some days I, too, wish for a scapegoat. A quick fix so that we can get back to ‘normal’, whatever that means. It would be so much easier to find a source of blame for The Great Unknown — a person, a group, an ‘other’ — than to acknowledge the fear lodged in the pit of my stomach. A fear which sometimes masquerades as a nostalgic longing for the seeming certainty of another time and place.
While hibernation isn’t a permanent solution to cope with a new world order (at the very least, for the sake of fitting into my jeans this spring!), I did need some quiet to process the tumultuous events of 2016: to breathe and reconnect with the fundamental truths about life, beyond the mind-numbing narrative dominating our collective psyche today.
A glimmer of insight
What I came to see clearly through this grilled cheese-infused reflection is that: 1) I feel helpless in the face of the large-scale unrest currently gaining momentum around the world; 2) I don’t know how to reconcile these macro shifts with the relative mundanity of my life in the here and now; yet in spite of this, 3) I want to make a meaningful contribution to society as an agent of possibility, driven by compassion and love.
While I haven’t yet figured out how to turn this hibernation reckoning into action, I did find a clue buried in those bedside journals:
We must never forget that we may also find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation, when facing a fate that cannot be changed. For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn one’s predicament into a human achievement
– Dr. Victor E. Frankl
The seismic shift we are living today may not necessarily constitute a ‘hopeless situation’, in spite of what the headlines say. And I cannot compare the degree of suffering in my own life to the horrors from which Dr. Frankl’s philosophy was crystallized.
Nevertheless, his words speak to me at a time when none of us know what to expect next, when the very foundations of everything we once believed to be true is shifting beneath our feet.
We each hold the power to transform our trajectory of fear into personal triumph. In doing so, the minutia of the everyday matters: every action, every day is an expression of our purpose. The place to begin is with my first breathe every morning…and with every step that follows.
(Feature photo: Maxime Le Conte des Floris)
