Saturday we drove to Minneapolis and watched a cyclist get hit by a car. We were 10 feet away. It easy could have been our car putting someone in critical condition. Then we immediately tried on Warby Parker glasses. The human condition is wholly, wholly insane.
Now Orlando. So I sign petitions and share them on Facebook, and give money to Everytown. There has to be something else to do. Some other way. Write about it. Scream about it. Convince people. There is no moral value in doing nothing. But it's so much easier to throw up my hands in disgust because NOTHING CHANGES. Someone said Sandy Hook was the turning point. Once we accepted that, we would accept anything. Let's not. First off, don't worry. There's nothing tragic going on over here. In fact I am becoming more and more keenly aware of the abundance in my circumstances and in the world generally.
But I have been thinking about The Tragic Gap, an idea I encountered in a book by Parker Palmer. The rock and hard place alternative. Sitting between them until a third way opens. This is bending my mind in the best possible way. So many decisions, or even just FEELINGS, hunches, statements of purpose, feel so either/or in my head, and now I have language for what it means to see that, hold both possibilities in the moment, and wait. I say that here to mark this occasion, and because my experiences of clarity are often followed by experiences of forgetting. |