Just a drop of something sweet cannot change a taste that is powerfully bitter. We must persist in the face of failure. Dalai Lama XIV
Paying attention will take its toll on your mental health. Lauren Elizabeth
Discouragement is the illegitimate child of false expectations. Lane Adams
I became quite discouraged at moments, I must admit. What’s the point of telling the truth if nobody wants to hear it? Margaret Atwood
Too many sorrows I have known,
too many sadnesses unsaid.
A lake of woe surrounds my heart,
the last remains of tears unshed. Susan Noyes Anderson
Sometimes a work week will grind you into sand, pulverize you into particles. Colson Whitehead
Fatigue, discomfort, discouragement are merely symptoms of effort. Morgan Freeman
Over the past six months, I’ve been asked by several people to explain “where I’ve been,” why I’m not writing as much, why I don’t seem as attentive as in the past to impediments to human health, peace and dignity.
I’m still in the game, but together with the fact that I have lost a few miles off my metaphorical fastball, I haven’t felt particularly energized by the direction that the world has taken, a direction which I now control, if at all, in the smallest measure but a direction which I lament has clearly gone considerably off the rails on my watch.
Another reason I have been writing less is that I honestly don’t know what to say any longer, know what to say that I haven’t already said, time after time. I now have a “reputation” of sorts given the values and policies for which our UN project advocates and which we have been determined to incarnate in some fashion or other. But while we might occasionally have gotten high marks for effort, we have no illusions about our current and legacy organizational impact. Nor do we any longer have illusions about the impact of other efforts in other contexts, to more than a few of which we have contributed skills and resources.
If we are honest, there is discouragement which hovers over many of us like dense fog. Discouragement that the institutions where we have invested energy have been co-opted or merely under-performed. Discouragement that our officials with considerable outside encouragement have chosen to reinforce the worst in our collective character. Discouragement that the young people we revere have not been spared the consequences of our illusions and even our arrogance. Discouragement that we have not been up to challenges from storms that gather even as ideas and energies like my own slide into contexts more quaint than relevant.
The quotations above describe some of what we feel even in our bones. The “lake of woe which surrounds our hearts.” The expectations which our psychic history has largely crafted for us and which we then, too often, hold the rest of the world responsible for. The constant sharing of the truth we are privileged to speak while recognizing how difficult it is now for people to truly hear, drowned out by endless distractions and the truths which they, too, seek to convey. In my little vector of society, we are after all, more proficient at sharing our vision than at listening to the vision of others.
And yet we must, as the Dalai Lama intones, find the means to persist. Despite our frailties and discouragements, we must discern how to stay in the game with whatever energy and wisdom we can muster. We must try to add a modicum of sweetness, not matter how modest, to a world which has become more than a tad too bitter. Failure is always an option in this life. Surrender must not follow as a consequence.
The title for this piece is a quotation from Barbara Kingsolver, a favorite writer for me. Yes, many of our spirits are failing. And yes we need to find that “balm” which will allow us to carry on even on those days when we feel that circumstances around and within us have “pulverized” us into particles.
What we should ask might that “balm” look like?
My suspicion is that the answer is somehow reminiscent of finger prints, a feature both common to fingers with prints unique in design. It is a balm which we can live out and communicate in common with others, but inevitably craft out of our needs and aspirations, the life experiences we cherish and those we would gladly eject, the legitimate and false expectations we have foisted on an unsuspecting community, the environments we help to create that make us feel most alive and inspire our capacity for repair and healing, and those which we have done too much to compromise.
For many of us, this balm consists of local matters of family and gardens, houses of prayer and hobbies that turn into passions, wildlife encounters, life with pets, life with the arts, our music, out dance, our forests. These are just a few of the contexts which allow our unique pattern of interests and investments to find expression in ways that our systems and institutions often do not.
There is discouragement potential here as well, of course. Children don’t always mature in ways we would hope. Gardens wilt under the intense heat which is now a yearly feature of our weather forecasts. Religious leaders don’t always take us places that we haven’t already taken ourselves or are content to move a community based on their own, sometimes skewed version of divine expectations. Some of our loveliest natural retreats are sacrificed to material “progress” in the form of shopping malls or data centers. Some of our art is too self-indulgent to assist the viewer in seeing a larger and richer world.
Discouragement, yes, but also opportunities for our souls to expand or find respite. However, we recognize that while the balm to which Kingsolver’s quotation points has distinct local elements, it is not entirely local. A full dose encourages more localized attentiveness but also agency on a larger canvas, one on which people with massive power and resources have now foisted their own version of the good on the rest of us, a “good” which in so many instances is relegated to serving only their own agendas. Their hubris also requires our attention, especially in these moments when the myths and structures of the US national experiment are giving way to corruption and cynicism of a form I have rarely witnessed in my long and semi-productive life.
Thankfully, corruption and cynicism are not the final words. There are so many out there who refuse to quit, refuse to give in to distractions and material comforts, refuse to abandon values for which their ancestors advocated and even died, refuse to give in to the fatigue and discouragement which so often accompany even our best efforts. There are still people who have found ways to stay attentive to an often mind-numbing present without losing focus on the people and places which give them comfort. There are still people who help respond to mental health challenges which might otherwise shut our contributions down for longer periods than we would wish. We honor their dedication and seek to learn from it.
It is understandable that other people feel the need to isolate their emotional life from stories of wars, rumors of wars and other global disturbances about which they can generally do little. However, there is also substantial evidence, including through the UN, that prompt attention to the balm our failing spirits require can lead us back to the fulness of our good work in the world. In this vein, I beseech all of us to commit as best we are able to resisting the harmful fruits of this current, discouraging age, adding whatever hints of sweetness we can to a world which for many of our fellow humans (and other life forms) has become a bitter pill indeed.
