UNDER A CLOUD
When writing about Irina yesterday and the way that ordinary people are caught in the tides of history I began to wonder about this issue in a wider way. It seems as if almost everyone on earth is caught in the tides of history, often of nationalism, some in much more debilitating ways than others.
We are dropped here on earth into a culture, a social class, a family where most of us live out our lives. In our everyday lives we care for family and friends, get up in the morning and go to work, and enjoy the company of others in the evening. But for huge numbers of people hanging over them like a dark cloud are the tides of history over which they have no control. I live in a country where there is comparative freedom and a high standard of living. But even here I feel the polarization of liberals and MAGA people hanging over me. It doesn’t touch me much in my daily life but is always there with both sides threatened by the other while most Americans just want to get along with their daily lives. A yet larger and terrible example of this, also close to home, is the cloud of oppression that enslaved Africans lived under for so long and still live under, racism that colors everything they do from which they cannot escape. How did they manage to live full personal lives under this oppression? I think of my German family and the years they lived under the cloud of Hitler’s Nazism. I think of the Russians and eastern Europeans who lived their ordinary lives for so long under the dictatorship of communism. I think of the huge numbers of refugees in the world who are escaping oppression and the effects of global warming. They have been forced to leave their homes and ordinary lives in order to seek an ordinary life somewhere else. The tides of war or oppression or starvation sweep over them and their lives are almost unbearable.
This is just the way the world is for huge numbers of people. The question I have is how to live your own private life in a way that lets you be as fully alive as you can be when above you are the dark clouds of forces that are beyond your control. Some people— Viktor Frankl, Etty Hillesum—seem to be able to find fullness of life in even the darkest places, the Nazi death camps. Gandhi spent years in prison and so did Nelson Mandela, both unbowed by the weight above them. For most of us the dark forces are not so extreme, but the question of how a person lives a full life, the only one they have, with oppressive forces swirling around them and flattening them is a question that I wonder about but don’t have an answer for.
Somehow knowing you can’t change the forces that oppress you, you have to focus on your own passage, and in the narrow circle in which you move be as open and responsive and as alive as you can be. And each of us has to do this in our own way, for ourselves. We can join a cult or a tribe and that gives us a feeling of strength, but it also constricts us and becomes a weight in itself. In the end it seems to me that we have to find our own way.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 