“Whenever I look around me, I wonder what old things are about to bear fruit, what seemingly solid institutions might soon rupture, and what seeds we might now be planting whose harvest will come at some unpredictable moment in the future.”
Question to Live The earthquake has shaken me awake. How to stay awake? |
Integration Step
Start to articulate the hopeful story of our time that you can see and tell from where you sit — that the world doesn’t yet know how to see and to tell. |
Heart of the Matter
In another place in the conversation I had with Rebecca, she made that same case pointedly, in terms of how we don’t know what will happen or what the results will be of our own action. And this is such a wonderful and freeing thing to be able to take in every once in a while. You know, she said — she was quoting from Foucault, and she said this is not an exact quote. But here’s the thought: “We know what we do. We know why we do it. But we don’t know what [what] we do does.” We control our intentions, to some extent. We control our behavior. But we don’t control what that sets off in the world. The other piece of what she’s saying that feels so resonant to me for us now is this notion that the earthquake shakes you awake, and then the question to live — how do you stay awake? Here we are, this now post-pandemic generation. Everything that we thought we knew for sure, so much of that was upended. We were called to so many questions and to learn edifying and deepening things about ourselves and others and the world. How do we stay faithful to those questions and to that learning? I spent my 20s in divided Berlin, and the fall of Berlin’s wall in 1989 was utterly unimaginable, not just to me, not just to everyone I knew, but to everyone in that part of the world. The chancellor of West Germany was out of the country the day the Berlin Wall fell. And that experience that I had so directly, that there is always more to reality than we can see and more change possible than we can begin to imagine, this has formed me. I never expected in my lifetime to experience another turning like the one we’re in now, where the remaking of the world is truly upon us. |