The times in which we live are difficult, more difficult than a lot of people seem willing to admit. There is an abiding sense of collective anxiety, understandable but not always easy to talk about.
When things aren't going well for you in your personal life, perhaps you call a friend or family member or go to a therapist or support group to process your pain. Yet when your feelings of upset are based on larger social realities, it's hard to know how to talk about them, and to whom. When you're afraid because you don't know where your next pay cheque is going to come from, it's easy to articulate; when you're worried about whether the human race is going to survive the next century, it feels odd to mention it at lunch.
Collective depression
And so, I think, there is a collective depression among us, not so much dealt with as glossed over and suppressed. Each of us, as individual actors in a larger drama, carries an imprint of a larger despair. We are coping with intense amounts of chaos and fear, both personally and together. We are all being challenged, in one form or another, to recreate our lives.
On the level of everyday conversation, we conspire with each other to pretend that things are basically okay, not because we think they are but because we have no way of talking together about these deeper layers of experience. If I tell you what happened in my personal life today, I might also mention how I am feeling about it, and both are considered relevant. But when it comes to our collective experience, public dialogue allows for little discussion of events of equally personal magnitude. ‘We accidentally bombed a school today, and fifty children died.' How do we feel about that? Uh-oh, we don’t go there...
So we continue to talk mainly about other things, at a time when the news of the day is as critical as at any time in the history of the world. Not dealing with our internal depths, we emphasize external superficialities. Reports on the horrors of war appear intermittently between reports on box office receipts for the latest blockbuster movie and a Hollywood actress's vintage Valentino. I see the same behaviour in myself, as I jump from writing about things that demand I dig deep to obsessively checking my e-mails for something light and fun to distract me. It's like avoidance behaviour in therapy – wanting to share the gossip but not wanting to deal with the real, more painful issues. Of course we want to avoid the pain. But by doing so, we inevitably cause more of it.
That is where we are today. We are acting out our anger and fear because we are not facing the depth of our pain. And keeping the conversation shallow seems a prerequisite for keeping the pain at bay. Those who would engage in a deeper conversation are systematically barred from the mainstream: from newspapers and magazines, from TV, and especially from political power.
One night I was watching a news broadcast about the latest videotape purportedly sent by Osama bin Laden to an Arab television network. The focus of the American news story was not on bin Laden's message but rather on the technology by which Americans had verified the recording. His message was too horrifying; it was as though we were trying to emotionally distance ourselves from it by having a beautiful news reporter discuss the technology of the tape rather than its contents.
Visiting a medical office one day recently, I asked my doctor, a member of the ‘greatest generation,’ how he had been feeling lately.
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘How about you?’
‘I'm okay,’ I said. ‘But I feel like everybody is freaking out on the inside these days; we’re just not talking about it. I think the state of the world has us more on edge than we're admitting.’
‘I think that's true,’ he sighed. ‘Things would get bad before, but you always had a sense they would ultimately be okay. Now I don't necessarily feel that way...’ His voice trailed off, his sadness obvious. As unhappy as he was with the state of the world, he seemed grateful I had brought it up. The fact that we go about our lives as though the survival of the world is not at stake is not the sign of a stiff upper lip. It is the sign, rather, of a society not yet able or willing to hold a conversation about its deepest pain.
Becoming the change
We are being challenged by world events, by the tides of history, to develop a more mature consciousness. Yet we cannot do that without facing what hurts. Life is not a piece of tragic fiction, in which at the end of the reading we all get up and go out for drinks. All of us are actors in a great unfolding drama, and until we dig deep, there will be no great performances. How each of us carries out our role will affect the end of the play.
Who we ourselves become, how we grow and change and face the challenges of our own lives, is intimately and causally connected to how the world will change over the next few years. For the world is a projection of our individual psyches, collected on a global screen; it is hurt or healed by every thought we think. To whatever extent I refuse to face the deeper issues that hold me back, to that extent the world will be held back. And to whatever extent I find the miraculous key to the transformation of my own life, to that extent I will help change the world. That is what my new book, The Gift of Change, is about: becoming the change that will change the world.
Yet we seem to have great resistance to looking at our lives, and our world, with emotional honesty. And I think we are avoiding more than pain. We are avoiding the sense of hopelessness we think we will feel when confronted by the enormity of the forces that obstruct us. Yet, in fact, it's when we face the darkness squarely in the eye – in ourselves and in the world - that we begin at last to see the light. And that is the alchemy of personal transformation. In the midst of the deepest, darkest night, when we feel most humbled by life, the faint shadow of our wings begins to appear. Only when we have faced the limits of what we can do, does it begin to dawn on us the limitlessness of what God can do. It is the depth of the darkness now confronting our world that will reveal to us the magic of who we truly are. We are spirit, and thus we are more than the world. When we remember that, the world itself will bow to our remembrance.
From The Gift of Change, copyright 2004 by Marianne Williamson, published in the UK in 2005 by Element.
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