I was driving to meet a friend for lunch the other day, and the car in front of me had a bumper sticker that said rematriate the land. And I'm like, Yeah, right, that's a lovely thought, and also that is going to take a long ass time.
For me, as a super impatient person, the most challenging part of living in these times is how long it feels sometimes for humans to get their act together.
I know for a fact we're heading in the right direction. It doesn't mean that I think things are going well at the moment, but I do think that the patriarchal, oppressive, colonial system is collapsing and we are building something beautiful and powerful for all to replace it with.
But this transition is fucking awful, because it's a process and it's not an event.
And processes are slow in a way that the human mind hates. Or at least my human mind hates. There’s this constant sense of “shouldn’t this be happening faster?” or “why does it still look like this if we’re actually moving toward something better?”
Meanwhile, we’re all just… living our lives inside of it. Paying bills, working, taking care of people, trying to show up for our communities, trying to have some fun and not go insane, while also holding a vision of a future that, from where we’re standing right now, can look completely impossible.
That’s a very specific kind of tension to live inside of.
And I catch myself wishing the process didn’t take this long, or at least what feels like a long time from a human perspective.
But at the same time, I don’t actually think it’s taking too long. And I don’t think it’s going too fast either. I think it’s taking exactly the time it takes for the kind of change we’re talking about.
Because we’re not just swapping out one system for another. We’re learning how to be different people with each other. We’re building relationships that can actually hold something new. We’re developing capacities like resilience, clarity, discernment, the ability to stay present in the middle of chaos, that don’t happen overnight.
None of that can be rushed.
And I can’t prove to you that this is going to work out. I don’t have some grand evidence that everything is going to be fine in the end. But when I watch birds fly around a tree and see that stunning, simple poetry in motion that is nature, something in me trusts that we are not outside of that. And because nature always finds a way, so will we.
But honestly, even that is not the main point for me.
Because at a certain point, it stops being about whether or not this is all going to “work out” in the way we want it to. The real question becomes: who am I going to be while this is happening?
I could decide it’s hopeless. I could check out, disengage, succumb in despair. That’s a real option. But if I do that, I lose two things that I actually think are essential to having a good life:
- the ability to feel something like joy or aliveness even in the middle of very real, very fucked up conditions, and
- the ability to contribute to something beyond just myself.
And for me, those are not optional.
The Divine is not somewhere else. It’s present in all of this, in all of us, and part of living a magical life is staying aware of that even when everything around you is confusing or painful or unresolved.
Just the willingness to stay in it, to keep building, to keep relating, to keep choosing a way of being that lets you live and contribute at the same time.
Even when it feels like it’s taking forever.
Especially then.
Photo by Jakub Kriz on Unsplash