Current Moods and Suffocations

Current Moods and Suffocations

On Thought-Cages and the terrible state of affairs.

Written in English.

I can feel this tightness in my chest. This is all so terribly wrong. But it’s all been wrong for a long time. In fact, I don’t know that it’s ever been right before, definitely not, but that state of perpetuity does not condone the wrong in the least.

As we are all watching the world unfurl its limbs tentatively after ducking down in the face of Covid-19, we can see it stretching in worryingly asymmetric ways. Although all have taken an unexpected hit to the gut, some countries, some people seem to be much better equipped to recover - some seem to almost carry on where they left off before this epidemic constricted daily life, commerce and our personal dreams.

Other people, other countries are left economically crippled in its wake, and with poor leaders to guide them, we can see the world rip apart even more. Certainly, almost no-one on this planet is completely unaffected by this Corona virus.

 I feel a tugging worry that even the reality I used to know in my native South Africa, the place many of my family members and friends still call a home, is gliding away. My two worlds are being separated even more; a phone call with my mother sometimes leaves me saddened by the prospect of our worlds drifting apart even further, if only in the physical spaces we inhabit. Of course, engaging with another’s reality is uniquely enriching too, but it means we have fundamentally different concerns in our daily lives. 

And this feeling cements the choice I have made four years ago to forge my own path in Germany for now. Perhaps to continue in our family’s peculiar pendulum legacy of switching continents every few decades: one generation, born in South Africa, moves to Europe, the next, born in Europe, moves back to South Africa. Perhaps we are each looking for the mythical country passed on to us in the stories of our parents and grandparents; be it fairy tale castles in dark enchanted forests, or vast horizons on the open savanna and sunsets behind naked desert dunes. There is a sense of charged wilderness to both, but of course, the mythical country is an oscillating Fata Morgana of our inherited memories.

How do we even begin to fight this wrongness around us, amplified by our current crisis? It’s such a crippling question, a paralysing one, too large a mountain to climb. It’s a mountain of greed: When our own reality – inflated by social pressures and responsibilities - is more real than someone else’s reality, constructs like status, lifestyle, luxury and a false sense of grandeur can be more important than another’s life. It’s a mountain of pain, of jealousy, disdain for human rights and disrespect  for another’s dignity, it’s a mountain built from fear of never being good enough and of losing all, with veins of suffering seeping through its rocks like underground rivers. It’s a mountain with air so thin that it’s becoming quite difficult to breathe.

But this IS life, it’s never been different, just the types of injustices were different over time. Perhaps it’s all about a choice we make even as we and the world around us collaborate to shape our own personalities: Do we take, or do we give, primarily? Are we asking the question “what can the world offer me?”, or rather, “what can I offer the world?”?

Maybe it is our calling, as humans, to struggle against all that feels wrong, to answer the pain of the world not with anger, but with kindness and compassion, with the poetry of everyday small actions.

While this mountain feels so toweringly high, the immensity of it taking my breath away sometimes, I honestly believe I can climb a fair bit of it by noticing the small things along the path. While I kneel over a wild flower here, admire a perfectly curled infant fern over there, stop to gather small pebbles of kindness and slithers of shared stories, memories to pin into my personal herbarium, I never notice the steepness of the path I am conquering.

 In my dreams, as I turn to look back, I see thousands of lived-life-fragments behind me - those most precious treasures of all. And as I look around me, I can see brothers and sisters, climbing, climbing on a thousand different paths up the mountain, climbing on, despite the fact that the precipice is tucked away in the clouds, out of sight.