From Despair to Possibility

I’m now re-reading a book I went through very quicky to savor the contents. The editors of Not Too Late, Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua have assembled a number of articles under the book’s subheading, Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility. In another context I have been participating in an organizational review where the pandemic has brought deep grief and despair, though the participants seldom link the pandemic to the larger story.

One chapter I found moving and helpful was entitled Meeting the More and the Marrow. It began with a quote from Terry Tempest Williams, currently writer in residence at the Harvard Divinity School. Williams wrote. “A good friend wrote to me, ‘You are married to sorrow". She replied, “I’m not married to sorrow, I just choose not to look away”.

The writer of the chapter is Roshi Joan Halifax, a Buddhist teacher and some of her own insights are worth reflecting upon too. Here are a few of them:

“Before we touch briefly on the givens of hope and wonder, I think we must navigate, at least a little bit, the tough geographies of fear and of grief, as well as the moral suffering, to discover what these harsher landscapes might offer us.”

“We now face the loss of stable ecosystems in which humans have during the twelve thousand years of the Holocene. Yet it is also important to know that like grief, fear can be a kind of doorway.”

“So perhaps we can discover that fear and grief are givens. Working our grief, facing our fears can transform us”

“Transforming our suffering doesn’t mean that we are going to be returned to the state that we experienced before. But we can discover that suffering and loss have given us a greater ability to live in the present, rather than be overwhelmed by the past”.