What’s the point of getting out of bed?
It just looks to me like I have wasted my life.
I have no idea what I am doing.
These are things people said to me this week.
They are not slackers or cranks or dentists winging it when drilling teeth.
Just the opposite, they are each active, in community, and highly able in their fields.
In part, I think they are suffering from a time when the aftereffects and undercurrents of a global pandemic are stronger and deeper than we yet understand how to manage.
In part, I think the oppressiveness of living in a world in which we can all see everything—including large-scale barbarism and full-on buffoonery about which, like the pandemic, we can do nothing—grows more intense each day.
In part, being a human being continues to be harder than we pretend, difficulty not much alleviated (and often increased) by the ease of, say, YouTube, a supermarket, or droning in some new goods.
What to do? And what to say here that is not so horrifically cliche it drains rather than replenishes?
Probably nothing.
But when you can do nothing, do something, anything at all.
And if life feels wasted, well, keep in mind that consciousness is not a meter to be measured for comparison but a forest to be explored and treasured.
And if everything you do looks failed, then remember what Mary Oliver says:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
And seek out the kitten of you you are, the puppy of who you should be.
It is a very hard extended moment for many of us. And you offer good advice. Perhaps if we can remember that it has always been a very hard extended moment for much of the world, we might turn toward those who, despite its capriciousness, despite it cruelty honor the four directions, have faith in things unseen, and take refuge in small acts if kindness. Perhaps now more than ever we must turn to those who have survived in spite of and let them guide us out of the valley of the shadow of death.