GETTING UNSTUCK
Wednesday, Apr. 1, 2020
When stuck in a ditch, there is little comfort found debating whether we should have bought new tires last month, or checked the weather forecast – because stuck is stuck.
Whether mired in summer mud or winter snowdrifts, stuck is stuck.
Our task then is to get un-stuck.
Talking heads, pundits, officials, prime ministers, and presidents alike – like blindfolded children at birthday parties, pinning blame-tails on donkeys – pulled so many ways by fears and accountability.
Oh bother, what to do?
Whom to believe?
Which direction to go?
Start something new?
Re-examine everything?
Re-examine nothing?
Change?
Don’t change?
We’re all experiencing some version of this conundrum every day before breakfast.
Nothing any one person did, nor any one thing created this situation.
The world’s economy and markets genuflecting daily, everyone scrambling for words to describe it, for actions to react to it, and for understanding what we could have done differently (or next time to prevent it) has experts with many letters after their names talking into cameras as if they know something – though their collective vacillations paint the whole landscape.
It’s enough to drive you nuts.
Imagine what it’s like for those who were nuts to start with …
I have random days of clarity and too many nights of confusion. Days of imagination. Days of creative exploration. Days of horror. This describes most days, a swirl of those things, and just when I feel I’ve got a clear handle on my own point of view, someone disturbs my tranquility. Some days it’s a joke, an absurd news item, a political faux pas, or a link to some rabbit-hole theme of fact-flingers flinging questions rather than answers and asserting blame or shame, or rain on everyone’s parade.
Today, too few of us are confident or satisfied about anything.
A year from now, we’ll have a less obstructed view.
For now, I’m convinced the people of science have the best handle on what is happening; front line doctors and nurses, infectious disease experts, immunologists, and mathematicians. They don’t all agree, but they have the best information and the best capability to understand the data and the reality. It makes me wonder, though, if other problems of society got this much collective attention, if we might cure cancer, prevent diabetes, and heart disease?
We are not in a place of needing the right answer, or requiring the acceptable/communal solution. We are here, now, in this place where we sit, saddened and stunned. But the time for being numbed must pass now, we must resume being people of action. Don’t worry that many of our efforts will be wrong-headed or of immeasurable impact – that’s always been the case.
Yes, we need to be at safer distances from one another, but we are meant to be in action, in motion, in service, and in devotion to something. To work, to business, to cause, to people, to family, to friend, to foe – we are action figures. So, let’s get to work.
Our job is not to figure everything out nor to re-write history – our job is to get unstuck. That begins by doing what we know, what we do, following our best habits and best practices, and using our creative brain. There is no time or place for lizard-brain thinking.
