Tuesday, April 18, 2017

42

For anyone who has read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series: I have arrived at the answer.

For anyone who hasn’t: The answer (only, of course, the answer to life, the universe, and everything) is 42.

The question, of course, is what is the question?

Recently I’ve started my second attempt at reading Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly, this time as an audiobook that I can digest while working out or driving. LL had suggested I read it a while ago. Maybe a year or more ago. To my credit, I did start. It’s just that I don’t actually get far with reading books these days, unless it’s Moomin, Mymble and Little My, or perhaps Madeline, or Monster Trucks—our 2-year-old’s current favorite, featuring trucks that are actually monsters (I’m embarrassed to admit it’s actually growing on me). So right before a recent trip to Seattle I purchased the recorded version of Daring Greatly and started listening, again, as it were.

The truth is, I wasn’t quite ready to hear what I was reading, the first time around. I thought that I really “didn’t do shame.” I feel more ready now. The ready-ness journey has not been an easy one, and it is very much a journey that is ongoing, but I will say that it received a bolt and a jolt, a bump and a thump (to borrow from another favorite, the Meg and Mog series) from last fall’s election. Daring Greatly, for those of you who haven’t wandered into Brené Brown territory, is about shame, vulnerability, and the excruciating, exquisite transformation that happens when we “show up and let ourselves be seen.” It is not that I suffered from a terrible back-log of shame that needed to be worked through. It was and is more that I’ve become more aware of the small moments when I’m either turning towards life, as painful and awkward as it can be, or turning away. And I’m trying to turn towards.

So I’ve finally posted the essay I wrote, well, about a year ago. See my last posting prior to this. At the time I wrote it I knew it was premature. I knew that were I to post it at that time…well, it just didn’t seem right. It was “laying it all out there,” but I hadn’t yet put in any of the real work of relationship-building that I recognized I needed to do. Now, I think, I have embarked on that path. I am doing my best to put in the time and effort. It is exhausting, at times terrifying, and so, so liberating. I am also coming to grips with a basic truth that I already knew years and years ago; in fact I wrote and illustrated my own children’s book on the subject. The opposite of scarcity is not abundance. The opposite of scarcity is enough.

What does any of this have to do with the recent election and with the number 42? And, what is the question?

For me it is this:
We live on a dying planet, by which I mean that we are in the midst of the greatest life extinction event since the K-T (end of dinosaurs) boundary. We are living under a fascist regime that all of us bear some responsibility for allowing to happen, and all of us bear some responsibility for dismantling. Am I willing to speak up about this?

I am but one small scared white privileged straight male 42-year-old homo sapiens. Only through collective action will any of the above (regarding the planet) change. Am I willing to, not from a place of guilt, or despair, but from a place of love, hope, and possibility, reach out to those not like me, to make the world a better place?

Of the qualities I listed above (regarding myself), there is only one that I can change.
There is only one I can let go of.

Am I willing to let go of my fear?

Yes.

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