Who Will We Be – Now?

Below is Krista Tippett’s letter to the readers of The Pause. Lately I, too, have been thinking about how dependent our entire system is on the well-being of our bodies.  

But where will we land, ultimately?

Will we have grown-up a bit as a result of Covid?

Will we have more open hearts and minds?

Will we address gun violence at last?

Will we dig deep to find emotionally mature intelligent men and women to lead of country? 

Or will we continue to let our judgment slide because we’ve been emotionally scattered and shattered by the slap-in-the face realization we could die – soon.

How will we take that message forward?

Will we remain scared-silly about what we don’t control and turn inward, isolate and cling to cockamamie conspiracies to compensate for our newly realized lack of power…  or will we be “better” for the experience?

Could we learn from it? And act more responsibly than we ever have… in gratitude for being alive.

As Krista asks: can we and will we care?   

Just a thought – as you enjoy the holidays and approach 2023.

Vicki P.

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ON BEING, The Pause

by Krista Tippett

Dear friends,

December is always a strange and hard time for many of us — filled with experiences that contradict each other or contradict how we think we are supposed to be feeling, how we think “everyone else” is doing. This year December feels to me like a metaphor for this whole enduringly strange time to be alive.  

I’m longing for us to do more pausing and looking each other in the eyes and acknowledging what we’ve been walking through these last three years and what we are walking through still. Even when we are now able to gather in the same rooms with the same people as before Covid (the new B.C.), we’re all changed, and most of our institutions are changed, at a cellular level. We have losses, large and small, yet to grieve, including a loss of certainties that were illusory and that we don’t want back. But uncertainty is hard on us as creatures. We are not getting back to normal, and yet our instinct is to power through as though we were. 

I’m holding all of this in myself, perhaps alongside you, and feeling the toll it all takes. 

Yet, at the very same time, I’m impatient for us — those of us who are able — to look up and out and begin to walk into all we’ve been given to see and to learn, all the ways we’ve been given to grow. I’m re-summoning the astonishing realization, which we made as a species, that civilization rests on something so tender as bodies breathing in proximity to other bodies. I’m meditating on the first calling the pandemic set forth when we had to ask “what is essential?” as a matter of societal urgency — and every answer had something to do with the giving of care.