At the Cliff's Edge

Are you scared right now? I know I am. As the full magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic comes into focus, the simmering anxiety of extended isolation mingles with the scalding terror of a worst-case catastrophe. These fears rise in waves for me, mostly when I think of what might happen if my pregnant wife or two-year old daughter or aging parents were to get sick.

I’ve come to peace with the fear, though. It’s normal. Healthy even, as long as I don’t let it run the whole damn show.

And when the waves subside, I find I have two choices. Either take refuge in the privileges that let me (mostly) pretend that life is normal, or stand up straight and face the unknown with an open mind and an open heart.

I choose to stand and face it.

I invite you to stand with me.

We’ve made it this far, and whatever comes next, we’re going to need each other.

“A life’s work is not a series of stepping-stones onto which we calmly place our feet, but more like an ocean crossing where there is no path, only a heading, a direction, which, of itself, is in conversation with the elements.”

— David Whyte

The poet and philosopher David Whyte calls this choice “standing at the cliff edge of life.” The cliff's edge is the place where we encounter life’s unknowns. The sun is low behind us, casting our shadow out over the ocean towards the far horizon, pointing towards uncharted territories. Here we are asked to set down our plans and pretenses and look square into the raw, elemental truth of existence.

All things pass. Nature is a state of flow. Change is constant. Forms take shape then come apart. We are here. Then we're not.

In that brief, personal window of time between your particular arrival and departure, you might try to turn away from the cliff’s edge. But please remember: you are choosing to turn from the truth of your life.

And then, suddenly, at the end of your time here, you find you have to stand at the edge anyway. Stand and find out, just like everyone else who has ever passed before you, what lies on the other side.

"When faced with a radical crisis, when the old way of being in the world, of interacting with each other and with the realm of nature doesn't work anymore, when survival is threatened by seemingly insurmountable problems, an individual life-form — or a species — will either die or rise above the limitations of its condition through an evolutionary leap."

— Eckhart Tolle

There is so much that falls outside the bounds of our control. The whole of human history is the story of countless civilizations, countless ways of life, that all must have seemed so damn permanent until the moment they weren't.

Rome lasted for over a thousand years. Weathering war and plague and social upheaval for almost five times the length of our current American experiment. Until it got too big for its britches and the Vandals and Visigoths started picking the corrupted empire apart at the seams. And the Mayan empire is said to have existed close to three-thousand years. Three-thousand! Until the Spanish conquistadors showed up with their guns, germs, and steel.

Even within the past two and a quarter centuries of American life, we’ve faced a number of massive national and global crises that might have taken us apart. Civil War. Great Depression. World Wars I and II. The horrific 1918 flu pandemic (which, incidentally, may have originated in North America and likely not Spain). These era-defining events sometimes overlapped (e.g. WWI and the 1918 flu) increasing the complexity and worsening the fallout, forcing everyone to adapt their way of life.

Now, one hundred years later, another pandemic is sweeping across the globe. Thankfully, it’s not as deadly as the last one. But it is here, and it is impacting all of us. People are sick and dying. Jobs are disappearing. Businesses are failing.

This is our defining moment.

Not one we would have ever chosen for ourselves, but here it is.

No doubt, there will be others following in its wake.

The question is: who will we choose to become in the face of it?

"Maybe it did take a crisis to get to know yourself; maybe you needed to get whacked hard by life before you understood what you wanted out of it."

— Jodi Picoult

You or I don't have much of a say as to when or where or what we're born into. We are alive now, because now is the only time we could ever have been alive. I was born in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts in 1980. Maybe you were born in Nashville in the ‘40s. Or Tokyo in the ’20s. Or Jakarta. Or Los Angeles. Or S?o Paulo. Or Rabat.

Wherever and whenever it happened, the pattern for each of us is essentially the same. We show up, the world is the world, and we do our best to find our way through it. The particulars of our nature - our genetics, our heritage, our individual spirit - are thrust into conversation with the particulars of our place and time. Like water poured into a vase, we take on the shape of the world we're poured into.

But there is another side of this coin. A side that, growing up, most of us are entirely ignorant of. And it is perhaps the most important truth of being human:

The world as we have come to know it - the vase that shapes us - was shaped by every person who ever came before us.

Every brick, every rooftop, every strip of pavement was laid by human hands. Every business, every innovation, every idea began in somebody’s head. Every love song, every work of art, every way to gather was born in another’s heart. Every city or country or continent that ever had a name only came to be because some group of people made it so, drawing maps that only truly exist in their minds and hearts.

Each of us arrives into this ancient, haphazard, terrible, beautiful accrual of possibilities as a mere possibility ourselves, absorbing every ounce of life through our eyes and ears and fingertips. Who we are and what we’re becoming perpetually shaped by what we take in and how we make sense of it.

We survive by believing that this human society of ours is the full and final word on reality. And how could we otherwise? The world gives us what it’s been given, filling our senses with information, leaving it to us to fill in the gaps.

But if we dare to venture to the cliff’s edge — or if, as in moments like this pandemic, we are forced to — we find that nature is here to remind us of a deeper truth. There are forces at play, elemental energies, moving beneath the surface of our social and cultural inventions like a massive whale swimming beneath the hull of a tiny sailing vessel. We are subject to these energies. We were born from them. We will return to them.

Our planet existed before all of this and all of us. The continents that are now divided by oceans were once all connected. Over the coming epochs, these lands will flow together to connect again. These unending tectonics will continue on, well after the last of us humans leave this place, until the sun itself expands and swallows the planet in its nuclear light.

If we want our descendants to be around in the universe when that time comes, then we have to see that now, right now, our choices matter. Who we choose to become in the face of this pandemic will create the world that our children — and their children and their children’s children — will grow up in.

If we accept human society as it is, if we take it at face value and assume it to be all there is for our lives, then we miss our one wild, precious opportunity to make a real difference for ourselves and for others.

We are not just shaped by the vase.

We shape it.

Each and every one of us.

If we run from that truth, or ignore it, or neglect it, we are left clinging to the status quo like a raft in a storm, unable to see that our raft is made up from parts that are no longer capable of floating in the waters we find ourselves in.

But a new shore is just over the next wave.

It is our future, waiting for us to make it so.

We only need to find the courage to swim towards it.

“You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in. Give up all the other worlds Except the one in which you belong.”

― David Whyte

We are passengers on this beautiful, blue diamond of a planet, floating through the vastness of the universe. And our human civilization is a tiny spark in that vastness, the result of ingenuity, creativity, persistence, and a healthy dose of luck. Nature has always and will always put that ingenuity to test. It is inevitable. Our brief time here is part of an unbroken chain of occurrences spanning four-and-a-half billion years of planetary evolution, cycling through terrible catastrophe to vibrant, flourishing ecosystem and back round again.

We can try to fight that cycle, or hide from it, but that’s like a wave trying to hide from the ocean. Because inside of you, inside me, inside every one of us, inside every thing, there resides an unshakeable, unwavering creative life force. A force that transcends any particularity of status, identity, culture, or ancestry. It animates all life, from the heart of the sun to the roots of trees to the heart beating in your chest. It is the source of our creative powers in the face of the unknown. The force at the center of the whole universe, the potentiality of all life, even if there are none to live it. We all belong to it, and it belongs to all of us.

The cliff’s edge is an invitation to meet that force. To set down the remnants of the status quo that time and tides have washed up on our shores, so that we might see what lies beyond and beneath. An invitation to encounter the raw creative force inside of us, without filter. To accept that we have only this one life to live, for as long as we are given to live it. To see that the time we have is our time, in all of its beauty and joy, in all of its trials and tribulations. And that, in our time, we have the chance to leave a legacy of life for all those who will come after us.

The pandemic doesn’t change that fact.

It only shows us how true it is.

So come stand at the cliff’s edge and see what there is to see. Come find what lives inside of you. Come discover how you can help build a human future where every heart thrives.

It’s okay to be afraid. I am too. We all are.

Because the edge is the place where we might fall.

But it is also the place where we can learn to fly.

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