2023-12-10
These thoughts started arising in me while remotely connected to the Lancaster Quaker Meeting for Worship on this day. Elaborated later on in the day.
We will all get old, and die one day. What of those dying in future generations? Some of our current questions may have passed, but there will be other questions which are likely to be just as perplexing, if not more so, which will not be answered when they die. Thus, it seems neither better nor worse to be born into one generation rather than another.
My sense of the questions we need to address now is, not what will happen after we die, but questions like these:
These stand in contrast to, say: who will win the next football match, the next contest, the next election, the next battle, the next conflict? Will there be yet another war, despite our efforts, and what will be the outcome? All these questions preoccupy us, and seem important here and now. While a football result may not threaten our lives, a war may well. But in the longer term they will be less and less significant. So, again, what is ours to do, here and now, in the perspective of the long term (if not the eternal — “Sub specie aeternitatis”?)
Our sense of scarcity or abundance is obviously shaped by our own childhood experiences. My scarcity from age 7 was of human warmth, touch, comfort. So what I crave in (or as) abundance is just that. Others in other places or in past ages may not have had enough to eat. So they will crave abundance of nourishment. Likewise with money; or attention; or safety. Or even down to the detail of having been unjustly deprived of ice cream, or bananas.
For a little more detail on my case, I felt abandoned at the age of 7, when I was sent away to boarding school. Teal Swan's recent short is pretty close, and served to remind me that my real feeling was of abandonment. For sure, not nearly as bad as some other people's, but still, abandonment. The need that results from my own trauma is the need for abundant connection.
And, naturally, that obviously relates to healing narratives. My healing narrative becomes: (a) what's wrong with the world — lack of connection; disconnection … (b) what will heal my world — abundant connection … (c) how do we get there: the commons? community? co-living? polyamory? relating in collectivity? (All themes that I keep coming back to.)
Switch to you now. What has your trauma been? → your historic scarcity? → your yearned-for abundance? → your healing narrative? So, for example, were you brought up in poverty, and now strive for serious wealth? Were you brought up as one in an oppressed minority, and now strive for justice, equality, recognition, respect? Were you brought up being ignored, with scarcity of parental or adult attention, and now strive for fame, status, being someone special, to have that abundance of attention? Were your ideas repeatedly dismissed, and do you now strive to be always in the right?
How can we, together, stop each one struggling to prioritise his or her own scarcity-trauma-related healing abundance, and connect it all up to something bigger, more important, more significant than us as individuals, who will, sooner or later, be forgotten?
The common phrase is think globally, act locally; my recent variant is “trust in local, reach out global”. With this in mind, how might we pool our personal scarcities, along with what we have in abundance, and look outwards, together, at the global trauma? Here are the kind of questions that come up for me around this.
This personal global balance looks to me connected to the balance between present and future. When we open our awareness to the global and the future, and draw that into the present, then we can have what T S Eliot called “right action” in part V of The Dry Salvages, Four Quartets. It feels paradoxical, perhaps, but to me it is only in this kind of paradox that I find any substantial truth.