Unsustainable

There was something unsustainable about life the way it was. There was that pressing feeling that a change was needed, and soon. In other ages, or just in different geographies, that may have meant a war approaching. One grasped it at the individual level, and formed the irrational belief that, after a year of continuous travel which was nothing else but the intent of escaping the place where one did not want to be any longer, the trip in February to the Americas would be the last significant travel in a long time. One started thinking like this the November before, if not earlier. Little was one to know how rightful those thoughts were going to be. There came March and the world stopped. Indeed, no more travels were going to happen for an extended period of time. Not much of anything was going to happen anymore.

The only thing that is unsustainable is to keep making the wrong choices and sticking with them. The issue with that is that sometimes one puts in their mind the idea of a certain scenario about how one would like to present oneself to the world. Then, one, stubbornly, sticks to that idea even if the evidence, continuously, shows one’s discontent, discomfort, frustration and alienation with the story one chose. There are the ones who stick to these narratives all their lives, and all their lives they are nothing but miserable; and so they treat whoever surrounds them. And there are the happy ones, the ones who know that there’s no lesson in suffering other than suffering, and they make better choices. They go where they are accepted and loved, and they give acceptance and love. And so they make the world a better place.

I wonder if the difference between those two groups is just that each of them does what they are used to do; and what they were used to receive in those first stages of life where whatever one is surrounded with becomes one’s ‘normal’. Of course one can change and one does change – with the support of different environments – but, could it be that in our day and age, where our world has stopped, where daily news don’t necessarily inspire other than depression, anxiety and worry, that, no matter how much one learnt in later stages of life, one currently regresses to thinking, feeling and behaving in the ways one did in one’s childhood? And the fears and scars, the playfulness and joy, the surprise or worry we used to guide our first steps in understanding the world, are now the ones emerging and controlling the situation, one which has stopped being rational. Because what is rational about a pandemic; what is rational about being detached from your community; etc, etc.

So maybe what makes one sticking to unsustainable options is that one does not know better: one just does what one learnt to do as a kid; and so many things we learnt back then were wrong. Some of them were very right, too. Maybe the current state of the world and the bearing it has on the individual does not really help one to do better. Yet, in that awful state one may seem to find oneself, in the mud one has played for the past couple of years, one can – and must – find the will to put a stop to what causes the suffering. One must find the will to stop going where is known and familiar, but wrecked. No matter how familiar; no matter how comfortable. And so make existence sustainable again.