(G)ear Shift

Or Steering through the clouds of overthinking

1. It has, as they say, been a minute. Or more precisely, a little under 86,400 minutes since my last post. But who, as they also say, is counting?

2. And who is “they” anyway? I ask this not to be churlish, but because I actually AM curious about the answer. Sometimes “they” is “other people.” Other times it’s the zeitgeist or “conventional wisdom” (whatever that is). Or “they” are the naysayers, the cultural critics, the bullies, the oppressors.

3. But sometimes, I think “they” is the collection of chips on our very own shoulders. Chips made from the very dough we rolled out and cut into triangles and fried in very, very hot batches of oil and pulled out with our very own tongs and placed there, all by ourselves.

4. Last weekend, I had two impromptu conversations in which I used the words “existential crisis” to describe—or attempt to describe—this fuzzy headspace I’ve been bouncing around in over the past many months. I knew “crisis” wasn’t the right word, really, given that there was nothing emergent about what I was experiencing. And maybe “existential” didn’t exactly suit either, because I’ve always associated that word—whether I’ve been correct in doing so or not—both with a sort of absence of gravity and also with something that had a universe-sized scale to it, edgeless and ungraspable.

5. But a quick search for the actual meaning of the word reveals this: “relating to human existence, the experience of being alive, or the nature of existence itself.” Okay, so maybe “existential” isn’t too off the mark. But what do I mean when I say “crisis”? Aha. Etymology searches for the win! And “Crisis” comes from the Greek krisis, meaning “decision,” “judgment,” or “turning point” and derives from the word krinein, which means “to choose or, more pointedly, to separate as if through a sieve. In the late 17th century, Shakespeare apparently used it in his works to mean “any vital, decisive stage in the progress of human affairs.”

6. It turns out that the experience I’ve been associating with the word “crisis” for, well, my entire life, has been co-opted in modern times to suggest danger, instability, and urgently requiring attention.

7. Okay! So now I’m having something of a breakthrough, because what I’d been attributing to fuzzy, edgeless, bouncy mental gymnastics and inscrutable search for meaning turns out to be the act of sifting through the very ordinary fact of being a human being living on this earth every day.

8. And this calms me down in a way I can’t quite describe but which I am very much feeling as I type this. Because aren’t I always turning over, sifting, and deciding? Aren’t I always attempting discernment in a sometimes confounding, churning sea of choices? And aren’t I always relating to my humanness, to the nature of my own aliveness?

9. Aren’t we all? And isn’t this our work as a human family? And if it’s not, then shouldn’t it be?

10. Today, I have moved through the hours with a different set of antennae. Ones not focused quite so much on the edgeless, shapeless future. Ones not quite so steeped in cosmological meaning. Ones not preoccupied with a litany of outsized questions about my purpose or action plan or impact. I’m having an existential crisis, but it’s not at all what I thought it was because it’s exactly what I should be having. And this idea has me cranking the gear of my fuzzy yearning mind back to its slowest speed. And my antennae have picked up the smell of beach roses and sunscreen and a neighbor’s dinner. And my feet feel lighter on the pedals of whatever I was working so hard to push uphill. And my heart is beating its very human rhythm—thump, thump, thump. And for a moment, it feels like the whole world might live there. As if it already does. As if it always has.

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    And a poem from the archives (2022)