Loss

Loss has a way of confounding things.

We often float through life, assuming we have a sort of distant star or at least reference point on the horizon, and that as much as we may be turned about by the storms of fate, we can always find a way to steer ourselves back to that primary navigational locus. But then we lose something. To fit the nautical metaphor, maybe we lose track of our compass, or our sextant. We can use our hands for rough reckoning, but that only tells us where we’re going, not where we are.

Where I have been the last many months is lost. I’ve felt this way before: a sort of strange holding pattern where I’m just circling until I find what it is I’m supposed to be doing. I can blame it on any number of things: grief counselors who won’t get back to me. Insurance denying things they said they’d cover. My home construction being delayed by a series of bureaucrats pointing at each other.

But all of it is external. That’s all out there. That vague place where other consciousness exists and you don’t really know whether it’s external to you. It’s just this slog of things you have to do to survive.

Punch in. Make meals. Feed family. Punch out. Make polite talk. Get sleep. Well, scratch that last one. It’s the first thing that goes when I get knocked out of balance.

I had a ton of plans for this blog/newsletter. I had hoped to use it as a way to focus some kind of intent and do something positive with all the turmoil floating around in my head. I imagined it as a way to foster a commune of thoughts that had taken refuge in my head like seeds of crystal growth, awaiting the right conditions to blossom into form of consciousness. But I just can’t shake the feeling they’ve sat stagnant, awaiting some external stimulus.

I flash to a conversation I had with a friend I met across the ocean with the magic of the internet in my youth. Somewhere in a college dorm in Helsinki, he told me something I’d never forget. I’m paraphrasing due to time and brain capacity, but if I remember right it was something along the lines of “Chaos is a force of creation. When things are neat and ordered and seemly, nothing changes. Things settle into a pattern, and order smooths out all the wrinkles that form the differences that create art and thought. Necessity is the mother of invention, but certainty is the death of purpose.“

And I had hoped that the chaos that propelled me into this state would be something I could load into my creative engine, fuel for the fire. Burn it to make use of it, instead of letting it fester around me like yard waste. Instead, I found myself floating in a zero gravity environment of abject terror and confusion, having no vague notion which direction was “up.”

Sometime about halfway through the memorial service of a good friend who took his life this weekend, something snapped. All weekend long I’ve been short with family, impatient with myself. I can’t do anything right. I can’t see anything straight. I catch snippets of news and I feel a rage welling deep within me.

Today, on Martin Luther King day, Donald Trump swore to uphold the constitution without touching his family bible. The richest man in the world gave what can only be described as a Nazi salute, two times. Somewhere in there, I got the news someone very important to me has just been diagnosed with cancer. Not the same cancer that suddenly took my brother this last year, taking him from healthy to dead in two months. Not the same cancer that took my former room-mate after fighting it for most of his life. Not the sudden onset of an unknown illness that took a high school friend of mine only days before the new year.

I don’t know if this sudden sharp pain and urgency is, as Khalil Gibran said, “..the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.” But I have to move forward. I’m going to be writing more stream-of-consciousness stuff like this.

I really want to write things that are more along the lines of an academic journal but in simpler terms: carefully examined and researched. But I just don’t have the energy to do the research, and this well of thoughts is starting to burst at the seams of my consciousness. I look at my Google drive folder for this blog and there are no less than ten half-fleshed ideas that petered out when a research trail went cold. This is fine for someone who does this for a day job: I’m accepting no payment for this, and I don’t think anyone would want to pay me for it (nor should they).

So, all that to say, buckle up. The loss has become something else. I’m going to write more. And hopefully it’s useful to you! But if not, there are no hard feelings if you unsubscribe. I get it: in fact I support it.

I can’t promise the result of all of this will be real good. But I can promise it will be real.

In times of performative cruelty, kindness is not only subversive, it is revolutionary. Be kind. Even if you’re mad. Especially if you’re mad.