“After I was attacked, I became hypersensitive to all forms of violence. I’ve never told anyone this before, but I remember a few days afterwards, I watched an animal documentary where a group of fish were captured in a huge net, and I started crying and cried for two hours. And I thought to myself: frankly, when you see the violence of the world – the migrants who die, the working class who are persecuted by people like Macron or Theresa May as they insult them, make them out to be lazy, cut the little they have …
“When you see that and the transphobia, the black people killed by police, I just think it would be indecent these days for writers to talk of anything else but violence.”
– Édouard Louis
It’s strange. We live in a very violent world – we always have – but this same world is also filled with so much kindness and beauty and countless things worth living and dying for.
We live in the very heart of a giant, impenetrable paradox. I almost want to say “and there is nothing we can do about it” but that is just not true. In fact, could it be that we’re exactly here to do something about it?
I suspect we’re not here to build a perfect world; we’re here to build towards a better world. This gives me so much hope. At 91 Jane Goodall is still flying around the world advocating for conservation. She hasn’t given up because she believes things can be better. Not perfect, but better.
The current state of the world is terrifying, and maybe we’re on the verge of some truly horrific times, but we have to keep going. In the long run, maybe this is what our souls are here to do.
I don’t know if the human race will inevitably evolve upwards – become wiser, more loving, less violent – but I know for sure, that in each moment we are tested we have the option to revert to our basest instincts, to allow our defense mechanisms to cause harm to others, to close our eyes and ears to new knowledge and new ideas and new viewpoints that threaten our sense of self, or to take the other path.
What is this other path?
This other path points to our higher human potential to learn with humility about the things we don’t understand, and to hold wide-open space for the possibility that other people are not monsters, they are just different. And with this humility – also a form of “fragility” – the heart of the world can crack open, and we can then walk into each other’s lives and offer up the most precious gift possible: Our reassurance to these “monsters” on the other side that we believe their stories, even though we don’t understand.