Always Wrong

The Guilt of not Doing & Fixing

I often wonder how to navigate a world in which I am constantly seeing harms, questions and worries that others around me don’t seem to notice? Especially when there is already so much going on in the world, and I don’t want to constantly add to the weight of it all. It is a natural coping mechanism to numb ourselves. To avoid being in a high-alert emotional state at all times. This being a state our body can’t sustain for long. I am definitely not holding this question on my own; in a way, I feel lonely, together with a lot of others.

In a world this messy and confusing, there is a self-protecting need to be confronted less, not more, with harm, hurt and complicity. Among the constant devastating stream of news and headlines, the unseen harm, the insidious, the normalised, is exactly what we need to pay close attention to. The stories we hold, the language we use, the ontological fundamentals of our beings, the myths we pass on across generations, the beliefs we hold, the identity we protect, the rights we claim, they all form the ground from which the harm and the headlines that end up numbing us all sprout.

Photo by Utsav Srestha

It’s exactly this vicious, insidious circle that holds us hostage. The complicity and the harm hurt us; we can’t deal with the hurt, we want to fix it, and we want to fix it fast. We push for solutions and answers without facing the insidious dynamics that nurture the harm. Without facing these dynamics, we will forever perpetuate harm. Creating and sustaining hurt from a well-intended willingness to fix.

After all our attempts and efforts to fix, we are too tired and numbed to do the work that truly matters. To decolonise, question, unravel and hospice. For this work, we must strengthen our attunement and discernment to these underlying insidious dynamics. The question we are holding, among others, with the Seismic Questions collective is “How may we engage in this work with gentleness to others and ourselves?”

Becoming the permanent killjoy is not helpful. Nobody holds that kind of person around for very long, and we do need to be around and among each other to do this work. Constantly picking apart language left and right isn’t useful either; it makes it very hard to have conversations, and we risk placing (academic) language on a pedestal and diminishing other ways of knowing and being. Simultaneously, we must be aware and careful with language as it can shape our ways. When left unchanged, it may hold us hostage in objectifying, colonising, othering, framing and separating. Inviting awareness to the weight and implications of words can be either tremendously impactful or an immediate conversation stopper. Depending on how and when we extend the invitation, we can tickle annoyance or curiosity.

The world, especially the internet, is so full of solidified opinions, rhetorical questions, hurt and unprocessed trauma, making it extremely hard to tread lightly. Trapped in a forever double bind. Never able to choose a word, direction or approach that ruffles no feathers. To one, tolerance is everything, the solution to a fragmented world. To another, tolerance is a threat, it’s complicity and denial of harm. To one using the terms BIPOC (Black Indigenous People of Colour) and SWANA (South West Asia and North Africa) are appropriate terms in an attempt to decolonise mind and language. To others, they are harmful artificial clusters forcing a tremendous diversity of people into a lazy abbreviation. For one, circular economy, regenerative business and doughnut economics models are life-saving constructs. To others, they are linear, solutionisitic lullabies and potential perpetrators of the colonial/imperial system. As long as we keep up dualism, we will always be wrong.

Photo by Yuriy Vertikov (Kaleidoscope)

Always Wrong

A 21st-century human
Far removed from the times
of simply roaming the animal kingdom

Out of tune with the beating heart of life
I am always confused
always lost
always worried

A lingering feeling of wrongness
Happiness with an edge of darkness

Resting in a bath of ToDo’s
Tired of the whirlwind of harm

Overwhelmed by complicity
Frustrated beyond my being
Constantly fixing
Always falling short

Finding no peace
in a restless world

Even my joy
is washed over by guilt

I am feeding
a forever-hungry system
feasting on my being
consuming all
leaving the soil depleted

I am longing to be fully present
enjoying a nap in the golden sun

I am longing to be human
among humans
who still understood
themselves to be animals
without all the ridiculousness
that emerged
after we invented..
Ownership

The Guilt of not Doing & Fixing

Photo by Jordan Whitt on Unsplash

Do you ever enjoy a nap without feeling guilty? How absurd is a culture where it’s a widespread phenomenon to feel guilty about naps, rest and doing nothing? About blissfully chatting away with our neighbours, swinging in a rocking chair or staring at the trees in the garden?

Of all things I need to unlearn, I find the productivity mindset one of the hardest to shed. It is no wonder I am always tired. What I deem important is not considered productive or “impactful.” I stopped attempting to fix things and fight for artificial solutions, recognising them as futile attempts of scared humans to control life. Most solutions invented from within modernity are informed by ways of knowing too broken to sprout anything truly aligned with life on earth. I truly understand why people want to push for impact and create solutions. The efforts give a sense of control that might ease our tiredness. I truly understand, but I no longer can ignore the unintended harm, limitations and often ridiculousness of the projects and ideas we centre as impact and solutions.

I continue to write, question, converse and (un)learn whilst worrying I am not doing enough to bring relief to a broken society. Attempting to fix anything beyond my bioregion, beyond my community, quickly gives a smell of saviourism, which, with all my best intentions, will perpetuate the systems that are crumbling the world. Born in the Netherlands, a hyper-industrial country with a colonial history (and present), I see it as my responsibility to unlearn, unravel and hospice. For this work, I have to accept living with a life-long tension between undoing and doing, between unravelling and producing. This is a tension I have to recognise and deal with. It can not be that I continue to do & fix solely because doing and fixing “feels right” and gives me peace of mind. After decades, centuries of doing, controlling, pushing and fixing, it’s time we stop, unravel, hospice and question. Instead of pushing for solutions, all we can do is create the conditions for emergence.

To become a person, a culture, a society that can do without doing harm, we have to do the work of becoming. For future generations to have the opportunity to be, we have to become.