Joy as Ballast
My friend is in Costa Rica on a vacation of a lifetime. Yesterday she pinged me and said that she was going to post on Facebook about the wonders of the trip, but as the US had just bombed Venezuela, it felt like a horribly insensitive time to be like, "Having fun in Central America! Good luck with the whole illegal war thing!"
I felt myself get mad, and it took a day or two for those feelings to find words, but I found them.
It doesn’t really matter where you stand on politics, we all feel the fissures in our country. We have life-long friends that we carefully don’t talk to anymore, family we dance with, conversations are a minefield of “What is safe to talk about?” It is so hard to find a place to process what is happening in the world because the heaviness is everywhere, and you don’t want to be *that* person who tanks the room. You either place your thoughts a box that you have secured with a carefully crafted lock and key, or your internal life is a dumpster fire of unwieldy fears popping up (and out) in the most inconvenient times. It is exhausting.
When my friend couldn’t even post about her vacation, I felt the ballast that keeps me upright in this storm head overboard. Of all the benign, American, things to talk about, a vacation must be the epitome of safety. Vacations boarder on the boring—I’m old enough to remember hours long slide shows of people’s trips and you hope they have good chips and dip to get you through.
The truth of the matter is that it’s not vacations that are taboo, it’s that we are afraid to have any joy, because the pain in the world is so real, joy feels insensitive. As I’ve been saying all year, “How can we talk about what is good without seeming to turn a blind eye to the bad?”
In my friend’s comment, I felt again the insidious hand of evil leisurely reaching to smother our connections with one another, to isolate us into “us and them” camps by gradually eroding our real connections. The current situation is making the subjects that used to form friendships, community, tainted by any number of taboos. The old adage of “don’t talk religion or politics” has worked to make almost any conversation of substance touch either religion or politics, and so all we’re left with is pablum and our thoughts atrophy.
Joy shared matters. Life shared matters. What is happening in our government is cringe-worthy, destabilizing, and continues to put many people in danger. We cannot look away. But we need each other to look steadily at the pain and see what is ours to do. We must also look at the joy that connects us. The giggle of a child in the grocery aisle, the cat that stretches undignified before the fire, soft candles that flicker in the early dark of the season, projects that put a piece of you into the world, books that leave you laughing, or thinking. Talk about the beauty of a vacation, share an inspiration you stumbled on, send a picture of what made you smile. Make a place in your world sing, so others can hear it and carry on.
This is how we resist. This is how we mend. This is how we live. Together, with joy as ballast for the voyage we are on.