“It is said that despite its many glaring (and occasionally fatal) inaccuracies, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy itself has outsold the Encyclopedia Galactica because it is slightly cheaper, and because it has the words ‘DON’T PANIC’ in large, friendly letters on the cover.”
“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” by Douglass Adams
Y’all, the earth is a crazy place. This is not new, it’s just more evident this week than I remember it being for a while.
Actually, let’s dwell on that for a second.
The earth has been crazy for a LONG time. The history of humanity is full of swings from awe-inspiring to terrifying and back again. Even just in the last century in this country, we went from the Roaring ’20s to the Great Depression, from Jim Crow Laws and lynching American citizens to the Civil Rights movement, from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the technological revolution. Evil and despair right up next to beauty and growth.
Our story has always been one of both/and, courage and fear, learning and confusion, love and loss. To embrace this duality is to be fully human, fully alive.
During the Second World War, when England was daily being bombed by German troops and things were looking awfully grim for humanity, one Oxford professor spoke these words over the radio:
The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life.” Life has never been normal.
“Learning in War-Time,” by C.S. Lewis, 1939
During the Vietnam War, when 500,000 U.S. Troops were deployed and 58,200+ of them never returned, Louis Armstrong sang these words:
I see skies of blue and clouds of white
“What a Wonderful World,” by George Douglass and Georg Weiss
The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night
And I think to myself what a wonderful world
The reality is that earth is always on the brink of total chaos.
Which leaves us only one question: how shall we live on the edge of this precipice?
For many of us, myself included, the automatic reaction is cynicism. We reflexively give a negative response, either to people’s legitimate concerns, fears, and difficulties or to the possibility that things could turn out well.
Author Jennie Allen remarks, “Cynicism is always driven by fear of the future or by anger regarding the past. Either we’re afraid of something that might not ever occur, or we project something that has occurred onto all the days that are to come.”
Either way, no matter which half of the glass is empty, we’re acting out of fear. Researcher Brené Brown notes that regardless of our circumstances, “We’ve learned that giving in to joy is, at best, setting ourselves up for disappointment and, at worst, inviting disaster.” We fear to open ourselves up to the possibility of loss, of pain, of being taken for a fool.
But to live in fear is to live only half alive, because it closes you off to hope and beauty and courage and kindness and joy. It’s true, cynicism may ensure that you are right about the future or that you avoid being disappointed or inconvenienced. But to claim loudly that you will survive a pandemic, without noticing the fears of those at risk, is to be half alive. To sell every stock and bond so that you, at least, will not suffer when the economy collapses is to be half alive. To separate yourself from the joy and beauty, to ignore your fellow humans, to pretend everything is fine, to panic purchase a truck-load of cleaning supplies, it all leads to being only half alive.
To be fully alive is to offer help and hope to those who are afraid and in danger, to stand up against injustice, to believe the best in each other, to hold onto hope when the precipice seems unavoidable.
I want to choose to live fully, even if it hurts, even if it takes me for a fool, even if I end up without any toilet paper in the actual apocalypse.
Today I’m going to find one way to embrace beauty, kindness, and joy.
What about you? What will you do today to live fully on this crazy earth?
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