My lovely, intelligent brother in law Colin sent me a video the other day of Bret Weinstein (of Evergreen College fame) talking at something called a Virtual Futures conference. In that talk, Bret conjectures about a healthy mental state in facing the world we currently live in and the myriad crises we face.
Bret suggests we can neither live in an entire state of hope, thinking someone else will fix the problems, nor fear, unable to move or act due to the immensity of the problem. I tend to agree, and think since we cannot live in one mental state alone we would be best served to oscillate between informing ourselves about the state of the world and how the crises are unfolding and engaging in small, meaningful, human-level solutions to the everyday problems we face in the world.
I'll give you an example. Today, I watched an episode of the Handmaid's Tale. It's a novel I loved and a show I've been meaning to watch for years. During the show, I feel just dread and fear. I feel some sort of responsibility to watch it, because it draws so heavily on authoritarian regimes that have actually existed in history. It is like a show that is a lesson in what is possible, and how to think through the playing out of potential social crisis in the future. In this moment, I feel I am fully informing myself, and fully experiencing the dread and fear about the state of the world. In this way, I am confronting and naming the issues, learning about them, and not pretending they don't exist through some misplaced optimism.
But then what? Then, instead of living in dread, I go back to solving the problems of my daily life. One of those problems, here in Uruguay, is getting laundry clean. Yes, it's mundane, but so are all of your lives. These problems make up our days and these days make up our lives. I couldn't get my towels white enough just with bleach, and they were getting more and more grey looking, and less inviting to use on my clean post-shower body.
This had been bothering me, so I looked up the cleaner I've been told works wonders (by real people, not just the infomercial) Oxiclean. I know I can't get this product here, and also I am always looking for more healthy/less chemical alternatives for cleaning. I found that in oxiclean is an ingredient called sodium percarbonate, which is a mix between hydrogen peroxide and washing soda. I immediately called the pharmacy to get a big order of peroxide, but washing soda is not something you can get here. I then found that you can turn baking soda into washing soda by baking it in the oven at 400 degrees for an hour, which makes it more basic/alkaline and helps to clean with more force, naturally.
So, I ordered two big bags of baking soda along with the peroxide. They came in two days later, I baked the baking soda and in my little science experiment I turned NaHCO3 to Na2CO3. I mixed up a little formula of water, peroxide and washing soda in a bucket and left my towels to soak. Then, I washed them in the machine with a little soap and also peroxide and washing soda. Voila!!! They came out bright and white. A real accomplishment. The work results in the feeling of nice, clean, bright, white towels. I had a presented problem, I found a solution I liked and could do, and I fixed the problem.
Overall, this is my life, and this is the life I have chosen to live. It is not easy starting from scratch and re-making all the solutions to all the problems of everyday life. But, these little surmountable challenges bring meaning to my life, as little challenges do for all people. And with each new challenge and new solution I feel less overall dread and despair, and more confidence and ability. It is in the mundane that the future is made. It is in all these little decisions we make. How we wash our clothes, raise our kids, spend our days, who we spend our time with, what we eat. There is so much work to be done tweaking each little part of our lives, little by little, to improve them and thereby make the world a little teeny tiny bit better. This is the work we have before us. Join me.
Bret suggests we can neither live in an entire state of hope, thinking someone else will fix the problems, nor fear, unable to move or act due to the immensity of the problem. I tend to agree, and think since we cannot live in one mental state alone we would be best served to oscillate between informing ourselves about the state of the world and how the crises are unfolding and engaging in small, meaningful, human-level solutions to the everyday problems we face in the world.
I'll give you an example. Today, I watched an episode of the Handmaid's Tale. It's a novel I loved and a show I've been meaning to watch for years. During the show, I feel just dread and fear. I feel some sort of responsibility to watch it, because it draws so heavily on authoritarian regimes that have actually existed in history. It is like a show that is a lesson in what is possible, and how to think through the playing out of potential social crisis in the future. In this moment, I feel I am fully informing myself, and fully experiencing the dread and fear about the state of the world. In this way, I am confronting and naming the issues, learning about them, and not pretending they don't exist through some misplaced optimism.
But then what? Then, instead of living in dread, I go back to solving the problems of my daily life. One of those problems, here in Uruguay, is getting laundry clean. Yes, it's mundane, but so are all of your lives. These problems make up our days and these days make up our lives. I couldn't get my towels white enough just with bleach, and they were getting more and more grey looking, and less inviting to use on my clean post-shower body.
This had been bothering me, so I looked up the cleaner I've been told works wonders (by real people, not just the infomercial) Oxiclean. I know I can't get this product here, and also I am always looking for more healthy/less chemical alternatives for cleaning. I found that in oxiclean is an ingredient called sodium percarbonate, which is a mix between hydrogen peroxide and washing soda. I immediately called the pharmacy to get a big order of peroxide, but washing soda is not something you can get here. I then found that you can turn baking soda into washing soda by baking it in the oven at 400 degrees for an hour, which makes it more basic/alkaline and helps to clean with more force, naturally.
So, I ordered two big bags of baking soda along with the peroxide. They came in two days later, I baked the baking soda and in my little science experiment I turned NaHCO3 to Na2CO3. I mixed up a little formula of water, peroxide and washing soda in a bucket and left my towels to soak. Then, I washed them in the machine with a little soap and also peroxide and washing soda. Voila!!! They came out bright and white. A real accomplishment. The work results in the feeling of nice, clean, bright, white towels. I had a presented problem, I found a solution I liked and could do, and I fixed the problem.
Overall, this is my life, and this is the life I have chosen to live. It is not easy starting from scratch and re-making all the solutions to all the problems of everyday life. But, these little surmountable challenges bring meaning to my life, as little challenges do for all people. And with each new challenge and new solution I feel less overall dread and despair, and more confidence and ability. It is in the mundane that the future is made. It is in all these little decisions we make. How we wash our clothes, raise our kids, spend our days, who we spend our time with, what we eat. There is so much work to be done tweaking each little part of our lives, little by little, to improve them and thereby make the world a little teeny tiny bit better. This is the work we have before us. Join me.
