Uncertainty- my main state of 2020

As I sit here in the dark, I am not sure what to write.

Instead, I will refill my tea cup again, with Awake English Breakfast, hoping that this ritual will illuminate which thread I want to pull.

This pausing, pregnant with uncertainty, sums up 2020 for me.

Much of the time, I have felt a strange suspension, with a bitter aftertaste of whiplash. Most days I sense that I am looking through the lens of a soap bubble, where I can’t make out the details beyond what’s immediate. I am floating along, not knowing when another silent, but magnificent ‘pop’ will implode my sense of current reality. This sense of suspension and whiplash, all at once, brings on an experience of being battered by gale force winds. Battered by an emotional intensity so strong, I can’t do anything but take refuge in whatever becomes immediate once again.

My run to the poplars along Mary Lake. Hu-kwa Tea. The day’s highlights from my twelve-year old. A lit candle, with a wick too long. Fetching wood. A FaceTime call with a life-long friend.

The refuge comes after I’ve lived thirteen emotions between my first sip of tea and my last; that short span of time, that beckons life’s opposites.

The co-arising of opposites

2020 has beckoned the co-arising of opposites. We’re relieved and frustrated, joyful and full of grief, alone and together. Our emotions live on top of each other, in their own tight quarters of quarantine.

I am in love with my family and clients and worried about what’s friends in Katmandu or Michigan. I am longing to escape my kitchen/office/living room, while wrestling with my reluctance to continue the status quo of consumption. Craving connection, I want to head to town and walk with a colleague, and want to sink into alone-ness in my grey sweatpants at home. I am relieved to have made it through a ‘cold’ without it being Covid and feel anguish that I haven’t hugged my mom and dad in over a year.

As committed leaders of social change, compassionate mamas and papas, seekers of meaning and belonging, change-makers of integrity and impact this has been an uncomfortable stretch. In any direction, this ‘Great Pause’ has rattled my complacency and beliefs. I’ve been reminded, over and over that my actions impact the safety and well-being of my community, nation and our globe. That yes, my tiny decisions matter- and add up- to more or less ICU overwhelm. And that my experience being alone, isolated, and separate sucks…and that I really want to be together, more than I knew.

This pandemic is a metaphor for the most complex challenges on our planet. It reminds me that each tiny decision I make impacts equality and the health of ecosystems. And most importantly, that we’re better together.

Abandoning Control

My own wish to ‘go back to normal’ at times, tattle-tells on my desire for comfort and control. Comfort to when I satiate every desire in middle-class living and control when I assert my will over the immediacy of things.

Yet 2020 has dished out a script that sideswipes my illusion of control. With you, I too am a player in the Theatre of the Absurd, a real-time improv where our tiny decisions and capacity to be in uncertainty co-create the plot.

So where are the goods in all of this, when its so easy to focus on what’s been lost?

Influence and Hope

So this brings me to the characters of influence and hope.

These two are well-known in the realms of social media and the mythic religious. ‘Influence’ is perceived as the hype and persuasion of sex, money, and fame as ways to cajole clicks and buys. Riddled with manipulation and control, ‘influence’ is the new currency of capitalism. And hope, too. If defined in similar ways, hope can be a currency that buys our suffering and pain. If I can deliver hope, or trust in it enough, perhaps things will go ‘my way’.

Yet here’s where I’d like to rattle our current definitions.

To me, influence welcomes the magnetic field of co-creation. To be influential, it implies that we are able to use our energy, creative life force, and generative openness to welcome something anew. Ironically, it is comprised of the twin capacities: to let go of attachments and cultivate relationships with a sweet back and forth. Influence is the weaving of ideas, visions, and ways of being together that create movement on our teams, organizations, and social change. In other words, when I am influencing I am not bringing a quality of pushing or convincing but relaxation, spaciousness and curiosity. It is less about me, and my ego, but how I’m using ‘me’ with ‘you’ to bring something new into being.

And as I’ve been reminded by Brother David Steindl-Rast, hope is not about urging a particular future into being. Rather it is settling into the ‘possibility of surprise’, again and again. Meaning, if I can grow my capacity to be as present ‘to what is’, like those thirteen different emotions over my cup of tea, I’m able to stand in a quality of being that is ‘hope’. I’m not pushing away, but open to and curious about what happens next.

Hope and influence, then, offer an invitation to a state of being in this Theatre of the Absurd. A place of awareness. A ‘yes’ to the present moment. They are qualities we can cultivate in order to be more mindful of how we open or close to each moment, and how we want to participate in the improv of ‘next’.

Our ‘What is’ brings us our ‘what’s next’

2020 has stretched, awakened, and breathed new life into us while we’ve also witnessed breath taken, positions harden, and oppression deepen.

Yet if we open ourselves into this radically refreshing idea of ‘hope’- being open to the possibility of surprise- we can begin to see how we’ve each influenced something new.

Whether it’s how we create new rituals, like Zoom family gatherings, ordering Door Dash to people who are suffering thousands of kilometers away, stupid Christmas sweater Wednesdays on Microsoft Teams that elicits lightness, scripting secret poems to admired writers across the sea, or watching your neighbour’s breath climb upward as they whisper about a sudden loss across the winter fence.

This year, we’ve created new things through astoundingly banal moments of intimacy in being together and  alone.

So whatever you feel called to create, I wish that you orient and stand in each present moment as it comes. Give it all you’ve got- your awareness, attention, and trust in yourself that you’ll continue to be able to handle it. Because you never know what’s next is, as we’re pulled into magnetic orbit with each other.

And here’s a short poem for you, to conclude and thank this 2020 year….

I give my breath
Like awareness
Hanging in
Mid air
To the possibility
Of peace
In between our
Orange plastic
chairs
That sit separate
but warm

by
your willingness
to linger with me
Our molecules and

breath
Mixing

Love,

Jennifer