Dec 31st again.
Its been a good year. Actually, as I think back, for me it has been a very good year. A rough patch here, a tough bit there, but its been good. I enjoyed playing music and creating songs in the first part of the year as I lived in Victoria, I worked two seasons at the Outdoor School, and I recently started working as a Teacher on Call at a pleasant private school in Vancouver. I co-operated a flower growing and selling enterprise, I met a lot of new people and I saw a Humpback Whale breach gloriously from one of my many ferry rides. There’s been some magic.
There’s also been some angst.
I’ve come to accept- well I guess I’ve been coming to accept and am still accepting- that climate change is going to be really really bad.
It says something when the people who seem to have done good research on the topic and who I generally trust to have a good sense of what is going on tell me that they think we’re screwed. I mean, it seems that the vast majority of top scientists in the field agree that we are either screwed or very very very screwed.
I sat down with a very intelligent and very educated friend recently, who has been doing work on the interaction of climate change and migration. This friend said that those in power basically aren’t as smart as we might believe, that politically the world is set to get increasingly volatile in coming years, and that “we’re fucked.”
People have been using the word hope a lot recently, and I do think that hope is an active thing that can keep us moving when we are faced with realistic defeat and the despair that accompanies. “Hope” however, too often seems like a substitute for “optimism,” which, of course, we often see as a positive trait too. But in this case, if it means hoping for the best, watching others to little and doing little ourselves, it might also mean delusion. I agree that the new concept to hold onto might be “courage,” which, in this case, i take to mean accepting the pretty-overwhelming likelihood that we will lose to climate change very very badly but that we will stand up and fight it at personal cost anyways.
I say this, but am i actually prepared to live it? I feel like a lot of the blog posts i’ve done in the past are about carving out my story on the world- which is a pretty privileged place to be, since it suggests that i have power over my situation in life. But now the world might push up against my sensibilities, ask me to be carved into a story rather than carve, which might feel powerless, but what is left after i push back, back off or get pushed down might simply be my convictions- and I suppose I’m a little concerned about what will show. Maybe this is why its easy to make excuses; in addition to the fact that the reality is hard to swallow, when it comes down to it, this thing might test my metal, and i don’t know if i want it to.
This is hard stuff to process, and I think I might start a new blog to do so. No promises right now, but maybe I'll put a link to it here on this blog if/when that occurs.
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