I feel like I have been in a personal winter for a long time now. I bet a lot of people feel that way - that life has been hard, perhaps starting with the pandemic, and then bleeding into various other areas of life from there. I have had a lot of changes in these past two years, and most of these changes have been negative. I have lost no small number of close friends, mostly because they, or I, or both of us, hit the nadir of what we could each give and take from the other. I had a friend with whom I shared a lot of life, a lot of closeness, intimate moments about fears for our kids, our spouses and life in general. Somehow, somewhere along the way, with the weight of everything else going on in my life, I ran out of energy. In the aftermath of my family’s endless difficulties, my friend’s hard times just dropped out of my consciousness. I couldn’t give whatever it was that our friendship needed to continue. As the days turned into weeks, and then the weeks turned into months, it became harder and harder to pick up the phone and call. I knew I should have offered at least an explanation as to why I had not been in touch, but I just could not do it. My own personal tank was empty. I had nothing left to give. I am sure she is disappointed in me.
I also can no longer maintain relationships with people whose entire approach to life is doom and gloom. I bet you know some of these people from your own life - people whose conversations circle like an endless diatribe of their own stream of consciousness. Every single encounter with another human being - birthday parties, IEP meetings, book club meetings, garden club meetings, every cup of tea with a friend - begins with talk of what doesn’t work in the world, backed by their uninteresting, poorly thought out opinions. It is as if these people get into a social setting, pull some internal lever, and the topics of how horrible the virus is, how dangerous the political divide is, how blatant the disregard of Black Lives Matter, and how to prepare to live off the grid, go round and round like horses on a dilapidated merry-go-round. And, to set the record completely straight, I DO think this virus has been excruciating, the political divide is critically concerning, Black Lives have been ignored for way too long, and I have been worried about my ability to live off the grid for one reason or another since 1968 when I was taught to hide under my desk in case we were bombed by Russia. But does the merry-go-round ever close down for the evening? Is the merry-go-round the only ride on the pier?
What I am attempting to figure out is whether or not people are consciously engaging in conversations, or if they just put their thoughts on loud speaker with not so much as a nod to the impact to those around them? Or, do they believe what they think is so unique, so brilliant, that they are providing some much needed service to the rest of us? Is this lack of consciousness an impact of the lockdown where, while sheltering at home, they actually lost social skills? Perhaps they think that they alone are the valuable opinion holders on the planet and that, without them, the rest of us are just uninformed imbeciles. Do my Republican friends actually believe that their endless complaining about the current administrations is creating a closeness between themselves and people they love? Do my Democratic friends really think that continuing to talk about Trump, the insurgence, et cetera, is providing a much needed fertilization for intellectual discourse? Do people believe that collecting all of the tragic FOX or CNN stories out there, and then talking about them over and over, is a valuable step in creating the life of their dreams? Or is it that they just don’t think? I can’t tell, but I am interested in knowing the answers to these questions.
And, just to be clear, I am not against any of these conversations per se, but I am questioning the impact of them on ourselves and those around us. This has been, to quote George Harrison, a long, cold, lonely winter lasting over two years. I don’t know even one person who isn’t struggling in a significant area of life. Not. Even. One. Person. I do know people who are making the best of things, who are hard wired for positivity, who are skilled at counting their blessings, but everyone I know has an area of life that is so hard that it depletes energy from every other area of their life. And, I am also not against complaining, by the way, but I AM against complaining as a communication style. If you are complaining to me with a commitment to either get something off your chest so you can get in a better space, or to problem solve, or to dissect an issue in order to get some resolution, then I am your girl! Count me in! But if that is not the intention of the complaint, then I have other valuable questions. For instance, who am I to you, if the only thing you have to say to me is how fucked up things are? And, much more importantly, who are you for yourself that the only way you can connect with others is to provide a constant babbling of all the negative aspects on the planet?
I guess that, in the end, I am proposing that we are going to need to develop other ways of being in the world, other practices and behaviors, to get through whatever personal and collective winter we are experiencing. I am not sure how we are going to emerge on the other side of these very tough times if we continue the constant unconscious, mindless discord detailing the “winter of our discontent.” If that were going to do something to help us all heal, it would have already done so. I wonder if we could possibly expand how we interact with each other to include things that nurture us through these times - homemade soup, warm blankets, silly TV, drawing, poetry, planting, building, walks in nature, cups of tea with people, petting dogs…I don’t know, something other than what we have been doing for the past two years. Is it time yet? Can we do that now? Can you please just shut the fuck up?