More than Survival

We've made it.

Another week, another set of decisions to be made, another collision of memories and moments.

We're here now, at the far end of a week that saw a rollercoaster of sociopolitical foment, war, death, chaos, lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Like waves crashing against the shore, we're being tossed against the inflexible nature of what it is to be human with all of our jagged edges. We're bearing witness to absolute power and how it corrupts, how our greed for resource blinds us to the innocents and destroys them in the crossfire, how morality is somehow fungible depending on how much you control, and...so many other rifts in our foundations.

I appreciate how nature handles these moments. The gull bobs and weaves through the misted ocean waves, searching through the occluded waters for something, anything to grab ahold of. It dives in, mouth open, to secure its catch, water cascading off of its features as it rebounds to the sky, and so the cycle repeats until satiated.

It's a cruel world according to our observations. We ascribe to this natural cycle the words and emotions that best capture the juxtaposition of need and want. However, nature has always existed in a plane far removed from our inherent morality. How can we say that a gull capturing fish or crustacean is a moral good? How can we say that the ocean waves as they crash against a rocky shore, chipping away at the landmass, is morally bad?

You see, these cycles have continued since the beginning of time: light and darkness, oceans and drought, death and rebirth. Each one completes as written into the stars and our genetic code and will continue until the planet we're on ceases to exist. And, at that point, we may very well in fact have concluded that we aren't, in fact, unique amongst the galaxies and stars. Who's to say?

All this is said to frame the reference I made at the beginning: we've made it. We've survived through our emotions and worries, through our demons that chase us, our anxieties that cripple us, through the ups and downs of love and loss. We are broken and yet, remade again. Each days is a cycle of death and rebirth, no less painful but no less beautiful.

We're heading into a few days of respite, where we set aside these worldly pursuits for fame and fortune and give ourselves to those things that matter the most: our family and friends, hobbies and hopes. Unlike the gull, we don't have to fight to survive...we get days off and, let's be honest, we're charmed for our existence. Our worries are as water, shed from gulls feathers: cast away.

Or are they?

I'm questioning today, questing for an understanding of our very essence, our ability (or lack thereof) to weather these tides of discontent and come out the otherside changed. I would like to believe we can be as bestial as the gull, surviving in a narrowed existence of eating, sleeping, reproducing, and savagery to stay alive. I would also like to believe that our nuanced version of the same is played out every day on social media, on the streets of Gaza, in the air over Kyiv, and in the darkened corners of humanity's hearts.

What I want to know, for certain, is that we can impact change, interrupt the cycles of mayhem and rancor, and come out the other side broken yet beautiful, wrecked and yet repairable, scarred but radiant. I believe this to be a truth that we can realize and it's something to strive for.

I've challenged you this week. I've asked you to consider that our foundations are, at times, rotten. I've given you pause for thought over what we have always thought were truths, our presumptions and purposes. I'm not going to stop giving rise to these things because, dear souls, in the midst of it all, I'm asking us to be better, to rise from the turgid waters as a gull, and do more than survive. I'm asking us to interrupt the cycles, change the outcomes, and chip away at the jagged edges of our humanity to bring us back to humility, kindness, compassion. We can do this but it'll take all that we are, all that we have, and all that we hope to do so.

Be the change.

Do more than survive.

May it ever be so.