What Will Be The Path?
Life Stuff
I’ve started to write here a few times over the past week; each time trying to write to the moment overall and to what’s been going on in my own life. But what the hell — sometimes things transform and change and evolve too fast. In deep and serious ways. In ways that won’t undo themselves.
Last Monday morning when I started on this round of writing, I was sitting outside a cardiac ICU (intensive care unit). It was eclipse day. Today a week later I’m getting ready for a funeral tomorrow because for all the best we have in medicine… sometimes it’s just not enough. We can have all the hopes and take all the risks but sometimes we just can’t survive the things.
I’m in a support role for this set of crises. I’m honored to be in a position to help. It makes me appreciate even more how much help I’ve had when I’ve been facing my own health crises, or dealing with those of people super close to me.
Not a one of us survives in the end… but along the way we sure need each other to find our way through the challenges that come up in life.
We need each other to find ways forward, but we also need to walk those paths together. It works better for sure. With at least some other people.
Options & Paths
But which paths?
I ask because we’re in this moment in human history where we’re facing all kinds of unpredictable change. I think the question of which paths we’ll go down together is huge and urgent.
I also think we’re maybe trying not to decide just yet… so we’re sort of hurtling along as everything gets more intense every day.
Just this weekend, we’ve had another major ramp-up in the Middle East that could go really quite wild — and not in good ways.
So what are we going to do as a society? Are we going to have a world war? Will the world’s most powerful superpower fall to a fascist, criminal demagogue? Will democracies fall to autocracy even as we’re in a climate change reckoning with increasingly limited resources and worsening disasters on a finite planet? Will the current iteration of bird flu evolve to human-to-human transmission and to a way more serious pandemic than the one we just survived?
Like… there’s some really, really big stuff going on.
What are we going to do with it?
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I don’t know what we’re going to do or which paths we’ll take, but I do know we’ve been getting the nonprofit here ready to help us all collectively reckon with this stuff.
We need to start getting into it more as a society. In the places where we live and work. With the people we see every day. With the groups we’re involved with.
This nonprofit has put a guide out to help people do stuff locally to amp and ramp up the conversations. To start shifting the narrative.
Anyway, get the free guide here, along with a few big lists of ideas to get started.
Any group or people anywhere can start getting into stuff. Climate change, energy, war responses, inclusiveness, women’s rights, any rights as far as that goes, basic freedoms, or whatever. We’re going to need all kinds of actions and activities as everything intensifies.
If you’d like to invite Shift the Country to speak to your group or just set up a conversation to explore options, schedule something here.
In the meantime, take care of yourself and of your people. We’re going to need us as we go forward. Connection and community will be absolutely essential — no matter which path we take.