Tuesday. November in this crazy year that is 2020. That’s where I find myself on this wonderfully cool evening in Arizona.
Not the first Tuesday of the month. That one was really scary. So were the following days.
I’m here, now, on the following Tuesday. The one after the long and drawn-out events of election week.
It also happens to be one after many, many months filled with one stressful, eye-opening event after another.
I’m tired. I’m ready to curl up and call it a year. I’ve worked hard. I’ve been through more than I thought possible. It’s about time to just… exhale. To let it all go. Fully. Completely.
But I know I can’t do that. We can’t do that.
We’ve seen too much. We know too much. The world we live in can’t continue like this.
So, instead of turning in completely, I took a few days to take things a bit easier. I let myself indulge a bit more each day – to let up on some of my stricter guidelines for living life. I ordered dinner once or twice instead of cooking. I drank a $7 latte. I watched some Netflix.
And now, it’s time to get back to it.
Our world today faces a series of challenges. Many of these have been known and understood for decades. However, our failure to take a serious look at these issues and our failure to take necessary actions to address them have led to all that has been 2020:
- a pandemic that is life-threatening to those with underlying poor metabolic health
- climate change that has shown up on our lands as severe droughts and devastating fires
- systemic racism that regularly leads to suppression of or even life-threatening situations for individuals based solely on the color of their skin
- a nation torn down the middle and unable to communicate to create any real change
We are in a tough place, my people. We’ve already been through so much. And yet, we have so much more that needs to get done.
So, what are we to do? How can we possibly take on all of this?
Four years ago, I found myself in a very different setting with hints of the same themes playing out.
It was day 3 (out of what I understood to be 7) on a 100 mile trek of the Continental Divide Trail through southern Colorado. In the previous two days, I had covered some 25 miles with thousands of feet of elevation.
The previous day had been brutal: Miles and miles with heavy packs. Ascents up to multiple ridgelines. An afternoon monsoon.
The previous night had been scary. Lightning ravaged the sky all night long. Thunder shook the mountains around me as rain poured down on my tent.
That morning (as with every morning on that trek) the alarm went off at 4:00 am, I woke up, made coffee and oatmeal, and packed up camp.
Then at 5:00am, as with every other morning, I started walking. However, unlike the previous two mornings, on this particular one I had a serious case of WTF am I doing?
I was exhausted. I was nauseous. I was somewhere in the middle of nowhere in the Weminuche Wilderness. Other than my best friend in the world and wonderful companion on this journey, I had seen only a handful of other human beings in these past days.
I still had 70 miles to go and it was going to take days.
And, I had a serious problem that would not leave my mind: there was no real way out.
Sure, there were some trails on the map that I could take to get out of this. If I chose it, I could turn off on one of these, walk for about a day, and find my way back to a highway. From there, maybe I could hitch hike back to my car at Wolf Creek Pass.
It wouldn’t be easy, but it could work. I could bail on this. It had been so hard. And what was in front of me – I didn’t know for sure, but based on what I’d been through, it was sure to involve even more fear and hardship.
But if I did that, what would I lose out on?
I didn’t know then, but from where I stand today, I can tell that girl that she would’ve missed out on one hell of a journey.
Thankfully, I didn’t bail. Instead, I kept walking. That is, I just kept putting one foot in front of the other.
And, as I did, I was scared. Heck, over the next few days, there were multiple moments where I spent long periods of time fearing for my life.
It was tough. It was scary.
But step by step, my feet took me forward. Step by step, I came across challenge after challenge (outrunning monsoons at 11,000 feet; thunderstorms that shook the ground below; an outdated map that did not represent the trail I found myself facing; ridge after ridge after ridge).
Step by step, I overcame each challenge.
I know now, that step by step, I can overcome any challenge I put my mind to.
The challenges we face today look very different from this one. That I also know.
For one, this backpacking trip was a challenge I opted into of my own free will.
For another, this was a challenge I could opt out of without serious repercussions. It wouldn’t be easy to make my way back to civilization, but I could make it happen if there were ever a moment I felt that’s what I needed.
I had felt my life at stake multiple times, but the risk of being struck by lightning isn’t too incredibly high (right?) and I had put myself in that position.
The challenges we face today – we didn’t choose them, and the repercussions of failing to succeed with these current challenges are catastrophic. I don’t mean to be an alarmist with that statement – I merely reflect the facts. People are dying around us. Meanwhile, we are in the worst economic downturn our country has seen since the Great Depression. The lives and livelihoods of our people and our planet are at stake.
Should we choose to opt out of facing them – this trade off means people keep dying and that we keep taking down our planet along the way.
I’m not okay with that. So, instead, I choose to keep taking steps forward.
If you’re with me, here’s what I think that means.
As with any complex problem, it’s impossible to see every step ahead of us. To make matters even more complicated, we have a number of seriously large and complex problems and each one is going to take a serious amount of work.
But we can do this. We can keep moving forward. We just have to keep taking one step after the next. Along the way, here is what we need to keep in mind as we check ourselves each and every day:
- Never forget what we have witnessed and lived through
- Pay attention to our own actions
- Pursue knowledge based on facts
- Continue to question our stories and beliefs
I could say a lot about each of these topics – and believe me, in the coming weeks, I will have much more to say.
But to wrap up here, I want us to press pause on #1.
- Never forget what we have witnessed and lived through
One interesting thing about being human is we have, programmed within us, a tendency to decrease interest in events the longer they go on.
This is, in its most rudimentary form, called habituation, something I learned about for the first time back in my intro to psychology class.
When we are presented with any novel stimulus, our amygdalas light up to let our brain know something is going on. If it’s something scary, it will be accompanied with a fear response.
We’ve spent a lot of this year being afraid, and for good reason.
We’ve also spent a lot of this year being angry – also, for very good reasons.
Unfortunately, when a stimulus is no longer novel (we’ve been seeing this on the news for months!) our brains stop lighting up and we lose interest.
“Oh, it’s just systemic racism taking the life of more innocent individuals.”
“Oh, it’s just a higher death count from the same virus.”
No. Nuh-uh. Not this time.
We are going to keep paying attention. We are going to keep tuning in. We are going to keep our eyes open and keep feeling this.
Got it? We’ve come a long way. We’ve been through so much. But we have so much further to go.
We may not know what all of the next steps are, but for today, we know this. We keep our eyes open. We keep tuning in. We feel this. We know this.
And we move forward from here.