Grinding Stop

If you listen closely, you can almost hear the gears of our world grinding to a halt.  March Madness, the NBA playoffs, NHL, MLB... all stopped. Restaurants, movie theaters, bars, nightclubs are closing. There is no where to go but home. Home. Home.

Grinding Gears, by Stephen Green

People are sick, the economy is failing, and life has been disrupted in manner that is unprecedented. We have absolutely no idea what is coming, or how all of our systems and structures will bear the weight of this enormous,  little virus.

My feelings are a cocktail, a mixture of flavors that offend my taste and those that shift my focus to the swill that enlivens my senses.

So much of our world is centered upon distraction. The more we have advanced as a civilization the farther we have veered from our essential guideposts.  The speed at which we move makes it impossible to perceive the subtleties that illuminate our path. We have stumbled through uncharted terrain in micro-incremental steps.  Our path has led us nowhere except further and further from our essence and our homes. We are lost.

At least it feels like we are lost. Except there are other paths forward. Not a single path. There are many paths. Many ways that we can recover. Remember how it felt to get a pimple? Some of us had more than one. Or, how it felt to trip and fall in front of your friends? Mortifying experiences for anyone in the midst of adolescence. Very dramatic. Very big. Huge, in fact. But, it is not enormous.
It just feels that way.

The world is in the throws of adolescence. Like an adolescent growing into emergent bodies and abilities, we as a world have struggled to fully comprehend the magnitude and complex impact of our own material, technological and systemic changes. When we created the internet it felt like a Michael Jordan dunk from the free throw line moment. IT WAS! IT REALLY WAS!

Or, it could have been if we had only had the ability to examine the range of possible impacts of this advancement. A broader view of the cumulative affect of this change on our way of life. Something that an adult could do...someone whose executive function is fully online. But, sadly, our collective brains are closer to 12 than than 32.

Hence the stumbles, falling flat, bruises, and now COVID-19...a deadly virus. A world wide tragic wreck of a disease, that had we been thinking more like an adult than a tween, we could have prepared for. But we didn't. We couldn't. We were just kids.

It's time to grow up people.

There is NO ONE WAY forward. There are many paths. But, when we begin to move again, as a world, we need to do so in a very deliberate way. We need to self-regulate and co-regulate each other as we move from tween-ager to teenager to adulthood. It's time. Let's do this.