So I want to write but…

So you want to write about what is happening in your world but find motivation difficult to access…join the club. That’s exactly what’s happening to me right now. And then, out of the blue, one of my friends sends me an article about hope. How do we practice what Jia Tolentino calls “ The Discipline of Hope”? Thank you Greer Quinn for sending me this fabulous article from interviewmagazine.com interviewmagazine.com called “Ask A Sane Person: Jia Tolentino On Practicing The Discipline Of Hope” by Christopher Bollen.

Bollen asks Tolentino what the pandemic confirmed or reinforced about her view of society…and she responds with this:

“… capitalist individualism has turned into a death cult”…

Well that woke me up. A death cult. And I can’t help but agree. Tolentino continues:

“ I am committed to the idea that the world can be better, and I have some amount of faith that being human, being able to love, is still an untouchably and unpredictably generative thing—worthwhile, across unknown contexts, in and of itself”.

So, that ability to love. It resonates… that’s what I’d like to write about today. But I don’t pick up my pen… I’m seaching for something but not really knowing what that something is…Tolentino seems to know:

“… in quarantine I’ve been aware of the intellectual stagnation that comes when you stop physically seeking out and experiencing new things. There’s a loss that comes from not meeting strangers, not doing things just for the hell of doing them, not having everyday avenues of discovery and surprise”.

I think many of us who would agree with this. I certainly feel a sense of stagnation, more some days than others. Today is a reasonably good day (its early, still time to action things) but yesterday was slow. That’s when I usually turn to my Rituals of Practice, but sometimes I simply can’t. And I allow myself to stop and hope I can again tomorrow. I seem to believe in Tolentino’s “discipline of hope”. I sit. And wait.

Tolentino focuses on her luck in quarantine…

“There are moments in quarantine when I’ve felt paralyzed by luck—to have sunlight and quiet, to have trees outside my window, to have my health and my friends and my family, to get to write for a living, to get to wake up and go to sleep every day with a huge dog and a person I love”.

And so I find myself creating a list of things I feel ‘lucky’ about, and suddenly I’m in the writing frame, and suddenly I’m practicing my rituals again (this time in the form of my gratitude journal). Strange how it goes…being open to new things, even if it’s just an article that crosses your path, sent by a kind friend. The article was a stimulus. A way of examining what is happening right now, right here. Tolentiino responds to a question “What is the worst-case scenario for the future?” and it is sobering…but there’s always hope in her responses such as

I hope ego death becomes a more commonplace experience. I hope the absence of stability and predictability revives our political imagination…

And not just our political imagination. I’m also interested in our personal imagination, where the personal becomes political. So even if we are in isolation, even if we are unable to do the things we usually do, we can have some influence on making this world a better place to live.