October 19th-21st, 2024

Today, I am sitting here with my plastic cup of Jack in the Box caramel iced coffee. Occasionally I pick it up and shake it to appreciate the sound of the ice, and the thought of crunching it. At 2 AM, I decided to check the Fedex tracking on things I sent last week, and found none of them had left. One of them in particular I am anxious about— a virtual reality headset I put in the mail to a mom of a foster child who is in for a rough year. At 7 AM, I texted my boss to offer to run the branch today because yesterday was a bad day — and sleep was likely hard for her, too. At 9 AM I came in to the branch and redid the schedule and assigned staff to events and outreach and myself to the first 2.5 hours of desk time, 1-3 outreach, 3:30 PM lunch. At 3:30 I went to Fedex; one of the packages was visible to me, one was on the way, and one —the virtual reality headset — appeared to be missing. I stopped at the Jack in the Box on the way back to work for some coffee to help smooth the angry edge into a serviceable smile. At 5 PM, my co-worker discovered his bike lock was cut, his bike gone. It was a feat — there is a high fence around the patio, and both gates that lead into it remained in tact, locked. The thief must have hopped the fence and then hoisted the bike over it on the way back. We pondered the possibility of thieves, plural. I told him to file a police report, to request the cops patrol the area for it; I filed an incident report, I called the weekend system supervisor to request any footage that might be available from the cameras, and I talked it through with my co-worker; did he have renter’s insurance? Yes. Maybe something there.

I did a lot of things today for a lot of people by coordinating the staffing of a branch and running it. I did it for the people who couldn’t come in and all of the public who did, and I feel good about that. It makes the Fedex experience bittersweet because the same employee who promised me my packages would arrive at their destinations yesterday, looked me in the eyes today and didn’t even apologize. The hand of God, I happen to know, is at work in relative experience, but this one small way in which I am let down in a society where I keep my end of the bargain. I say bittersweet because being good at my job is, in fact, its own reward, and there is a way in which someone else being bad at theirs reminds me that I have at least accomplished this.

Accomplishment, it turns out, is a condition. Publishing a book is not an accomplishment so much as being a published author is. If you read the profile of someone listing their accomplishments, they rarely say, “one time, I accomplished this.” Once I wanted to publish a book, but now — that I’ve grown up, ha — I write to move. It’s a funny thing to realize, the most interesting territory doesn’t come until after you think you’ve seen it all. That’s when the possibility of something actually new arises, which makes sense I suppose, but is not the traditional notion of a path, or a journey. In the Tarot, you start with the Fool and end with the World. But in experience, the World is an imaginary limit on what we can know.

One thing a lot of people want to know right now in this country is how the presidential election will go, and in this county, if the measure on the ballot for the library where I work will pass. If you cannot move forward in time at the speed you would like, you can either stand still in it — not always a bad option — or you can move forward in some other mode. For me, the fertile ground has nothing to do with the ballot, or everything to do with it; how do we, havers of liberty, position ourselves to best weather whatever storm comes our way? Just about half the country is going to consider us doomed, regardless of who wins, and while you may not think that whatever half you don’t belong to counts, the direction I am headed in doesn’t have to do with sides, it has to do with universalizing resiliency.

I believe that resiliency is a communal condition; a resilient person is someone who has made the right decisions about what communities to participate in, it is not someone who doesn’t need community. The relationship between resilience and independence is confusing. The more independent you are by natural disposition, the more resilient you will be in the face of the inadvisable thing everyone else is doing. But the relational nature of that fact reveals the truth: there’s a difference between thinking for yourself and defining yourself as not like everyone else. It’s very easy to point at what you aren’t, it’s also pretty easy to sound certain about what you believe, but it’s not so simple to experience the relational nature of existence. The person that you are is always defined relationally — in a vacuum, you don’t exist. For a long time, I charted a course for the vacuum, and it’s not that I think there is nothing to encounter there — I think we all know what’s there, and we will all get there one day.

But I didn’t quite consider the way that independence as a siloed expression can only illuminate possibilities that divorce a person from their relational being; this is surely death. The closer I get to the answers to questions that have plagued philosophers and discontents for millennia, the more I discover that tied into the very fact of being (alive) is all things that are alive. It is easy to reject this claim as new age, or religious, or self deception, but it is true even when it is not comforting, and it is especially true when people get to thinking they worship nothing.

What I am getting at is that independence is only healthy when it’s a common quality among community members, not when it is the mechanism by which you reject community. Inside community, independence is a necessary form of creativity. Outside of community, it is not possible to create meaning.

I won’t dwell on why that is, perhaps you can take it up with God yourself, if you’re so inclined. But —

I would like to invite you to chart a different course with me, in which we embark together on creating resilience together by rooting our writing in a contained place with inherent connections to the material earth. More on that soon. <3

For now, I think it is sufficient to observe that we can — and we must — create resilience together, regardless of what happens in November and beyond.