lili pons
Small Responses to Great Queries
Is motion necessarily directional? I often feel like this motion is meandering, not exponential. Lately I have been distressed by the fact that in equating stopping with giving up there is simply no room for redirection, pause, plateau. The bigger picture is motion but it's not progress, it's just expanding in width, not in height. The roots can only grow when the surface expansion has settled, the branches need a certain degree of regularity and slow digestion to even begin to sprout.
There is no attempt that exists in a vacuum, the value of the attempt lies in the repetition within changing conditions. The same motion will have different reactions in different contexts; it's not the attempt that is different, it's the surroundings that are in motion, a mixture of active agents and passively changing landscapes. Perpetual motion is a necessity purely physically; the emergent psyche traces different paths, not entropic but in-tropic.
Knowledge is a relay sport and there is a certain quality of awe and enjoyment at catching a glimpse of what is not yet known once we grasp a new piece of knowledge. The sharing, however, can happen in many forms and it is crucial the audience is met where they're at with just enough room to grab their hand, to pass the baton. Great strides mean nothing if we don't care for our teammates, if we aren't ready to experience a slow lap, if we cannot stop to care for an injury and mourn a loss.
To not turn away from discomfort and instead understand the suffering one is bearing witness to can be a core foundation for a more compassionate world, but I find myself quite often at an impasse, which is also mentioned in this entry:
What is one to do when they have come to an understanding about a specific type of suffering that they do not have the material means to fix, nor the practical framework to obtain those means? My operative answer is to educate, to share my analyses in hopes that one day they will reach someone that does have the means to address the structural suffering that others are subject to, that in some cases I am subject to. This, however, is incompatible with an ataraxic acceptance of a world that is not ideal: To accept the world as it is is to see the reality of suffering and hold it. Radical acceptance in this reality we inhabit is a dialectical struggle, it's not peaceful and the clarity does not come from letting go of the ideal, but a constant questioning of both the reality and the ideal. And yes, at times, the tension is physically and psychologically unbearable: in sharing it, we hope not to evoke empathy, we hope to evoke action. We share our experiences because we cannot change things alone. We share our utopias and our doubts because there is another to share the load with. Bearing witness for the sake of it means nothing without understanding, and understanding is not empathy, it's education.
I believe there is room for every piece in a narrative; I do not believe, however, that there is one universal narrative. This is not because there are archetypes of the soul, or essences that teleologically guide us to certain hauntings, but because the sheer complexity of symbolic and material relations on Earth at any given point in history results in a mutual eroding of the individual in a particular shape. It may somewhat resemble that which has been eroded by the same things in other times, in other spaces, or in the same, but the eroding agents are many.
Does that mean that even a coherent story is partial? Yes. But it does not mean that there is only one story. Do not expect your own story to ever be complete, but seek coherency, and most of all, seek the grooves of other stories that attach to your own. How sad would this world be, if our stories were the only ones worth telling. How sad to get all the pieces to fit right on the first try.