If you were to ask just about anyone -- whether they be a distraught Trump supporter or a relieved Biden supporter, a lockdown adherent or an advocate for a risk-tiered response to the virus, a back-to-the lander or an urban futurist, families with everyone stuck online all day or families whose wage-earners have lost their jobs – I wager all would say the current moment feels a lot like a nightmare. A suffocating, primal terror kind of nightmare.
I remember waking up from nightmares when I was a little girl, and the pattern is still the same even now in my fifties. In these bleak dreams, an ambiguous evil is always stalking me. I try to scream but there is no projected sound so I’m stifled until my screaming becomes audible and finally wakes me up. The nightmare sits close, pulsing into my waking consciousness, waiting for me to slip back into it. I have to sit up, shake it off or wander around the house, before I can let myself fall sleep again, to stop its vortex sucking me back in.
So if it’s true that most everyone experiences the current moment as a kind of nightmare, could our shared experience of profound fear be something that unites us, even if what terrifies us within the nightmare is quite different?
For instance, I’m terrified of a growing authoritarianism and government mandates related to our health choices. I have a deep fear of us becoming feedstock for a dehumanizing system run by artificial intelligence. Most of all I fear our increasing fear of each other. Not just the old intractable bigotry (fear) of people different than us, but the fear we now have of breathing the same air, of shaking hands, of embracing each other and where all that fear of basic human contact is taking us.
Maybe you share some of these fears, maybe not.
Many are terrified of the virus and its ongoing invisible threat and mutations. Others are filled with dread about what looks like certain ecological collapse in the very near future. Others still are fearful of those with more positional or social power and their propensity to abuse it, whether it be within a system, a workplace or in a household.
Many more of us are now terrified of losing the roof over our heads, income to buy food for our children, or access to a doctor when we get sick. All but a very few of us are scared of dying, death being the most dependable and transformative milestone there is, yet the one we have been seeking to avoid at all costs.
No matter what we’re scared of, I can’t expect others to fear the things I fear or trust the things I trust. If I were scared of losing my home or living on the street, things like contracting the virus may feel less scary to me. I myself have more time to fret about things like an ominous AI takeover, the specter of which someone trying to find stable housing or dealing with a cancer diagnosis may find completely irrelevant. To be scared of everything within the nightmare would be immobilizing, so each of us trusts in at least a few things, mostly out of necessity. Our nervous system has to be at ease somewhere or that system will collapse.
What I’m trying to say here is that who or what we fear and who and what we trust is, for each of us, a diverse kaleidoscope influenced by our unique lived experience shaped by many environments. Given that, I have quit the business of persuading anyone else to fear what I fear, even as most people around me seem to expect us to agree not only on what’s terrifying but what we should do about it.
It is this expectation for more unanimity, not only on what we fear but also how we should control what scares us, that is keeping us stuck in the nightmare’s vortex. Because as soon as we step back and look at everyone through that lens of common suffering, all of us sharing the experience of being in a nightmare we can’t seem to wake up from, we find compassion for one another, a much touted concept that few seem able to practice across the explosion of political and ideological fault lines.
Crazy as it might seem, given my many rants about Donald Trump these last four years, I actually felt the fear of the protesters who stormed the Capitol Building this week on January 6th. I could feel their fear—without in any way condoning their actions—and this helped me see them as human…and fearful, just like me.
Our seeming denial of this basic truth—that we cannot make other people fear what we fear or trust what we trust (except through manipulation)—is preventing us from much needed creativity around ‘how to respond.’
And respond we must at a time such as this.
If there were any group of people who can respond masterfully to whatever is thrown at them, it’s jazz musicians. Herbie Hancock speaks about the many things he’s learned from Miles Davis. In this interview, he talks about the time he thought he’d made a glaring mistake while playing one night. He said Miles didn’t see it as a ‘mistake,’ rather just as something that happened so he responded by playing something that made it work, a fluency for all great improvisors.
For Herbie, the big take away was essentially this -- “that we can look for the world to be as we would like it to be as individuals—‘make it easy for me’--we can look for that. But I think the important thing is that we grow. And the only way we can grow is to have a mind that is open enough to be able to accept situations as they are, to experience situations as they are, and turn them into medicine, to turn poison into medicine, and take whatever situation that you have and make something constructive happen with it.”
So if we continue to stare astonished and furious at the ‘others’ who don’t see our point of view, who are just as scared as we are, just about different things—especially those things we may in fact trust—then we will definitely stay trapped in this collective dream, forever mired in a boiling chaos.
Yet if we could broaden our perspective, open up our aperture as wide as we can muster, then we’ll start to see the ‘other’ human being as simply trembling in the middle of the night from dark visions of the unknown. And then maybe, even for just a moment, we could imagine holding them close as we would a child, reminding them again and again in a kind and gentle way, that they’re not alone, that we’ve been scared too, and through this acknowledgment of common suffering, we just might get through this thing and finally wake up. Together.
Illustration © David Laskey 2012