Our twenties are for deconstruction ("anti-ness") - and, yes: it takes at least a decade to unlearn the main threads of oppression, and how we have internalised them, and our thirties are for nuance.
Or so I think.
There is a "Yes! / No!" / "Good/Bad" vibe to our youth, and a "yes, but..."/"yes, and..." and "How?" (more context please?) to our maturing process.
I find myself equally alienated by the superficiality of "evil" and the self-proclaimed "goodness". The people on "our side" and our "enemies".
Yes, we agree that racism is bad...but how do we practice that? Yes, we agree that gender is a weird obsession meant to separate and oppress people, but how are we actually undoing it? Yes, we agree that community is important, but how can we have community without healthy conflict? Without meaningful forgiveness? How can we have forgiveness without a restorative route - when the route has not been walked before?
How to walk a route that has not been walked before without being messy? Would that even be possible? Did we really expect it not to be? And what does that "forgiveness" mean? What does it mean to us personally? What is "empathy" and is it only kept in a drawer for people that look, behave, and resemble ourselves as much as possible?
Do we measure - consciously or subconsciously - how much other people suffer on an imaginative scale that we have individually invented based on how much we know (and how much we /understand/) about other people's experience?
(And have we completely forgotten that a parasocial perception of others is not an accurate one?)
Who is to be forgiven? Who is doing the forgiving?
(I find myself, again and again, once I have the opportunity to hear someone's story, to understand them, to excuse them; this does not mean we have to keep everyone /near/ - the trajectories may not be compatible, but "forgiveness" is not about proximity: it is about a resistance to exile -them- and alienation -us-.)
How can we see our biases when their nature is to be unseen?
When we speak of "biases" so casually, have we forgotten we once had even the ones that now enrage us in others?
Have we forgotten we did not know then, and we can't know now that we have the ones we don't know we have?
A bias seen is no longer a bias.
Do we ask these questions of each other when we meet, or do we only update each other about work, home, family, and lovers?
Is that really that interesting, and to whom?
Do we give the gift of daring reflection to our loved ones, or foster resentment until we no longer consider them worthy because they did not improve the thing that we saw about them, but never told them?
Do we really expect others to evolve in a vacuum, far away from us, only within the paywalled intimacy of a psychotherapist office, or magically by themselves through telepathy?
Do we...really...still use concepts as "lazy", "unworthy", "bad intentions" while proclaiming ourselves to be against the systems that created this seed of mistrust and separation? Do we really see ourselves as fundamentally different and separate from other human beings? Do we understand the implications?
How is that not a result of the broader alienation we feel from the environment and life itself being stolen by us? By systems that benefit from us believing in concepts like "lazy", "unworthy", "bad intentions"?
How is this not what we talk about when we meet?
What has been stolen from us, and not just "why" (we know), but "how" are we resisting?
I have a core belief that everyone's struggles /feel/ the same to them: they are at capacity with whatever they are handling. Every single human being, from within their perspective, is a suffering human. That does not mean there is no reason to talk about selective ignorance, privileges etc - Yes, these are also unseen and circumstantial - and, yes, these need to be talked about BUT in a way that targets a systemic problem, not a personal failure. (That's just so Original Sin of us, don't you think? And OTN, yes, you may be an atheist - but have you questioned how much of your Christian/other upbringing still seeps into your ideological veins when you shame and look down on other people? We are The Saints and they are The Sinners? And, yes, you are pious - but have you considered you may be obeying the same moral compass with someone who isn't? It's just too obvious.)
I believe that it is the human condition to be at capacity.
We all take on as much as we can handle.
And the whole point is to learn to dance with it, sing to it, and "imagine Sisyphus happy" in this absurd human condition endlessly looking for meaning. Maybe carry the boulder together, for once, and then laugh about it once more dropping from the hill. Perhaps that's the meaning of it all: the search for the meaning being an equation, reversible by nature and self-fulfilling. For all the sinners and all the saints that exited the binary.
image: Hours of Louis de Laval, France, ca. 1480
No comments:
Post a Comment