concentrate on our ethical muscles

 

Dangerous pavements.
But  this year I face the ice
With my father’s stick.

Seamus Heaney 

 

There is snow, quite a lot of it, something that doesn't happen often here in this big fat river valley. It will all be gone by tomorrow but not before a night of heavy frost and ice. Looking outside, I can only see white and grey and black. 

Yesterday, I had the last of a string of medical exams and imaging tests and have been given the all clear for the long haul flight. Tomorrow I will start packing, summer clothes and bicycle helmet and the high SPF sunscreen lotion. Yesterday, I also deleted my instagram account, my social media activities are now reduced to reading a small number of writers on substack, a couple of blogs and mastodon, where I keep in touch with a group of scientists and climate activists. How weird it now seems, that initial excitement about social media and finding old friends from another lifetime and what has become of it, this strange addiction to scrolling and schadenfreude.

I want to continue exposing myself to the real world, and I know that - like the people whose homes are threatened by rising sea levels - I cannot do this without accurate information and that this involves a struggle with a great deal of dullness and nastiness in today's media world. 

It is so important to avoid seeking comfort in resentment, but instead have confidence in what people can achieve as long as they preserve their humanity as a core value. 

Because ultimately we have no choice but to love our world. We can follow our cynicism and our despair until the cows come home. But in the long run, that will neither change anything nor make us feel better. Seriously, there is no alternative to lovingly helping to shape the world. Otherwise, people who do not love the world will take over.

So, as a always, this means to pool my resources and energy with others to help rescue people from their agony of resignation, from their apathy born of despair - something I myself have known and continue to experience. But instead and without moralising, concentrate on our ethical muscles and our sense of community.

And remember, progressive movements have never been unified movements. We don't need to wait until everybody agrees or is convinced. Debating and arguing is part of the process.

To paraphrase Erich Fromm, without the practice of love of life, societies simply cannot survive.

 

I do wish there was less harshness to endure, less hardness for my soft body to push against, but what they all have in common in their endurance and adaptation is that they remain soft. I, too, plan to remain human, wide open to the heartbreak and despair of the harm being done . . . Let me not harden myself against all this hurt. Let me be owl down, seal fur, nudibranch flesh. Let me bend, give, flex. I plan to endure, and to turn towards cooperative efforts to right the overwhelming amount of wrong in the world.

 

Mary Beth Rew Hicks