We are going to have to love the f*ck out of this situation

Chapter 23 gets to how we are going to survive what's going down

This is chapter 23. You’re new here? You can also choose to start at the beginning or go and check out the rest of the book using this Table of Contents.

Context: Last chapter we established that the point of this whole palaver could be to return us to our humanity. I finished by dangling the idea that we need to ask who we are, and what it is that we are returning to. I’ll now try to answer this question that dangle. Oh, and the audio version is at the bottom, as always.

<Previous Chapter | Table of Contents | Next Chapter>

---

LOVE

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

- W.H. Auden

*

It’s time to ask who we are. If there is a great returning to our humanity to be had, then what exactly are we returning to? What will meet us when we’re fully stripped?

I feel - and you might, too - that when we know what this is, we can release into what is being asked of us. When we have settled into what is left when - or more accurately, as - we lose it all, then we can best handle what is coming and be able to hold ourselves and others in it. Because we will know that what is left can’t be taken from us!

For many of us, being called on to determine who we are and what is meaningful to us is incredibly challenging. We have been raised in a culture that has so estranged us from such enquiry that we almost don’t understand the question. But we don’t need to overthink things here (indeed, our left-brain is of no use with such a task).

Because collapse is seeing us live our way to the answer.

*

Who we are… is precisely what is left as collapse strips and shreds us. It’s what collapse can’t take from us.

Who we are… are all the things AI can’t be.

Who we are… is what makes us smile sadly when we recognise it in a child, in a stranger’s act of kindness. Sadly? Yes, because the longing for it in ourselves is so painful and full of regret.

Who we are… are the things that remain scattered in the ashes and in the chasms of loss. They are the (only) things that we can walk away with when our house and all our sentimental collectibles that we thought mattered go up in flames or get taken by flood. For instance.

Who we are… is what a parent wakes to when they’ve been displaced repeatedly in a genocidal “war” and find themselves still driven to go on, to show up for their children.

Who we are… is what we land at when we are thrown into absurdity. Absurdity is a cognitive clash where a larger perspective undermines the reality of a smaller perspective (our day to day lives) enabling us to see things in essences. Contemplating big subjects (such as, who are we? and what’s meaningful now?) will create this clash, so too flirting with that cosmic insignificance we covered earlier. It forces us to sit ourselves right back in the cinema and to see that our allotted 80-odd years on the planet are a playful speck in the story unfolding in front of us. What mad fun!

We can read Auden’s poem above and zoom out with him to view how the universe sees us and get absurdly aware of how much we don’t matter, which then provides the wild cognitive freedom to choose what does. Being the more loving one does! I mean, why not?

The louder the absurdity gets, the more we are guided in all this existential landing.

*

I read about a woman who lost “everything” in the Palisades fires. Insurance would not be covering any of it. She wrote on social media how she was focusing on the fact she still has her experience and skills as a therapist. She can still contribute and show up. She quoted Janis Joplin: “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose”.

When we say we are being returned to our humanity, we are being taken to this sense of our inherent freedom to boldly, bravely show up as all we really are.

We’re also being rudely “reduced” to our extraordinary ability to communicate, care and to cooperate¹. No doubt you have observed how these attributes surge to the surface, penetrating our otherwise self-absorbed crust, during pandemics, floods and fires. Our fundamental kindness (and, yes, we are fundamentally kind, under that crust²) and the softness that comes over us when we’re shaken and humbled by desperate grief is equally exposed. Ditto our ability to find beauty in even the most destructive and difficult of times; and, yes, to glean an eerie perspective in the absurdity.

These are all the things that remain when we have to walk away with “nothing”. But they are also exactly what we’re going to need to handle what’s ahead. Which is gloriously perfect. And makes some mad-mad sense just now, don’t you think?As cultural critic

Ted Gioia

wrote of our perilous future: “The actual winners will be holistic thinkers and empathetic individuals with basic human skills… I’m talking about love, care, trust, friendship, compassion, responsibility, family ties, kindness, dedication, faith, hope, courage, humility, respect and human decency.”

*

But if we were to go another layer deeper (or do that absurd zooming out thing), what exists behind all these things is…love.

*

In the past, when people have said things like “all there is love” and “only love remains” I’ve been left untouched, perhaps cringing a bit. These kind of statements struck me as pat schmaltz. But being in collapse has taken me to the “chasm of loss” where such truisms bear out. The hypothetical “what is left?” suddenly becomes a lived and urgent question that has only one answer.

I know a lot of us here are experiencing a terrifying groundlessness in our lives across all facets of our existence, not just from being in collapse. I am. It’s like everything is now reflecting and refracting the macro, it’s all being pulled into the same suck-hole. Loss and uncertainty is speeding up and there is less and less solid ground to decamp to - the floor is dropping out from under it all. I look around and see the shock and terror on faces as we try to fathom the enormity of this…WTAF?!

We're now in a post-WTAF era

I’ve been trying to sit with this like a ninja the past few months as I’ve experienced several losses, which collectively strike me as a comical metaphor for everything else, including the writing of this book. As I freefall into the groundlessness of these multiple punches to the guts of my being, I witness myself grab at old certainties - my former hopes, all my seductive cognitive buttressing - including the ones that tell me “this is all happening for a grand reason”, addictions and other people. But I realise these things are also in freefall now.

On several occasions I have felt like I’m falling to my death, and in many ways I am. A huge part of my “old normal” identity is dying.

Eventually, if I remain in the freefall and quit fleeing to false certainties, I find myself zooming out into a type of existential absurdity. What the fuck matters in this endless chasm? I am almost forced to notice if something else - anything else!? - might be accompanying me in the lonely descent. My left-brain has to throw in the towel (the infinite uncertainty is beyond its linear limits) and my right-brain kicks into gear. As it does, and as I surrender to the unfixability of my predicament, I feel an immediate, rushing-in sensation of a vast… boundless…love. It’s a felt knowingness. I can’t really describe it in words. Except to put these word down on the page before you: my heart stops aching and floats.

Goddamn. It was there all along! It was what I was falling through and into. This is what is meant by “love is all there is”.

*

I’m certainly labouring this point. But bear with me a touch longer. You see, love is and was always there. Our grief and fear exists only because love was there first. We grieve and fear losing only what we love. When Quantum physicists attempt to answer what existed before the first two particles entangled, and what energetic force saw them connect, they find themselves using the word and concept of “love”. Love is the matrix, the 4D canvas, the infinite vessel, the everything between all the things, the glue, what exists between the words, the pause that holds the thoughts, and that powers the reaching out. The aching forward of particle to particle, life to life, human to human.

*

Dear friends, collapse is getting us to surrender to this original truth about our human belonging and connection. Finally!

It’s teaching us that the most reliable, fundamental human thing we can do is to meet abject terror and despair with fierce, fierce love. How do-able!

Love really is our only antidote.

And, all things besides, we want to be in love anyway. There is nothing to lose in making love our strategy.

*

Madeleine Urion

again:

“I feel that my rage needs justice, I want the biggest offenders (tech bros, Putin, ultra-billionaires, Monsanto executives, Big Oil, Rupert Murdoch, Trump) to be confronted with shame and face the moral dilemmas they are running from. (But), is seeing another's humiliation truly healing? Does it truly tip the scales? It makes me wonder about approaching love as an act of justice…”

*

There is a beautiful refinement to this idea of fiercely choosing (or being reduced to) love that I hold close to me. In The Art of Loving Erich Fromm writes that our original human urge is to connect and experience the Oneness. Our civilisation has increasingly delegated this search for unification to religion, charismatic leaders with 12-rule plans, and, of course, consumerism. Fromm argues that we confuse belonging with conforming to a herd, which tragically only ever works to separate us, not connect us.

My friend Angela and I were walking around Bondi Beach in Sydney’s Eastern suburbs some time back and we were lamenting the conformity which defines opulent cultures: The same tattoos, the same lips, the same “chilled” aesthetic, the same aphorisms. I tried to drill down to the nub of what disturbed me about it all. I realised that it was that conforming is the cheap fix for the massive, original ache of our separation. Our ache to connect has historically seen us rise into our humanity - into courage, curiosity and creativity. But when we have cheap fixes available to us, we don’t bother rising and we miss out on living fully and nobly.

As Fromm argues, conformity doesn’t satiate. “Union by conformity is not intense….(and) is insufficient to pacify the anxiety of separateness.” The only way, he says, to truly connect and to be in our full humanity, ready to handle the toughest of terrors, is through the sufficiently intense act of love.

But! He specifies that “productive” love is what we’re talking about. It’s not passive love, the kind we wait for and expect to get from others or fear that we will miss out on.

It’s the giving of love. It’s being the more loving one. It’s fierce.

*

To close, I want to indulgently share this poem written by Ayisha Siddiqa, the 24-year-old Pakistani American climate justice advocate recently named a Time magazine Woman of the Year.

What if the future is soft and revolution is so kind that there is no end to us in sight.

Whole cities breathe and bad luck is bested by a promise to the leaves.

To withstand your own end is difficult.

The future frolics about, promised to no one, as is her right.

Rage against injustice makes the voice grow harsher yet.

If the future leaves without us, the silence that will follow will be an unspeakable nothing.

What if we convince her to stay?

How rare and beautiful it is that we exist.

What if we stun existence one more time?

When I wake up, get out of bed, my seven year old cousin

with her ruptured belly tags along.

Then follows my grandmother, aunts, my other cousins
and the violent shape of their drinking water.

The earth remembers everything,
our bodies are the color of the earth and we
are nobodies.

Been born from so many apocalypses, what’s one more?

Love is still the only revenge. It grows each time the earth is set on fire.

But for what it’s worth, I’d do this again.
Gamble on humanity one hundred times over

Commit to life unto life, as the trees fall and take us with them.

I’d follow love into extinction.

---

Love is still the only revenge! I’d follow love into extinction! Would you?

Sarah xx

Audio version:

1. Those three Cs we covered earlier that can combat moloch.

2. In his book “The Penguin and the Leviathan: The Triumph of Cooperation Over Self-Interest,” Yochai Benkler reports that the story we’ve been sold about human selfishness is not true - it applies to only 30 percent of the population (that Stanford prison experiment was fundamentally flawed!) The rest of us“systematically, significantly and predictably behave cooperatively.”