Writing has felt frivolous this week with everything that’s going on in the world. I thought, what’s the point? What’s the point of contemplating my purpose, or sharing some piece of me, when people are dying, when the world is on fire, when it feels like the only tool that’s left in the shed is violence.
Years ago, I was attending a leadership program, and someone asked, “Why are you so drawn to pain? What’s with all the darkness?” Maybe there’s something wrong with me, I wondered. Didn’t anyone else see the pain? I can’t seem to look away.
I have been derailed this week. The crisis in the Middle East, atop the Ukraine, atop the madness of US politics, atop the, atop the... Derailed is a great word. It assumes the path is fixed, and that the vehicle is affixed to the path. What a wonderful fantasy.
I was unprepared for the level of activation inside me as another war unfolded outside. I couldn’t sit, I couldn’t listen – to anything or anyone. I was no longer on the train, and the train was no longer on the tracks. Discomfort doesn’t do it justice; I was derailed and paralyzed with fear. And that’s me, here, sitting in my comfortable home, in my comfortable life, far from the real loss.
Frivolous, indeed.
I haven’t been looking at the reels online. It’s not to protect myself from seeing the violence, because I don’t need to see to feel. I know war. It’s in my soma. War says, “I need YOU!” I know the hidden and not-so-hidden corners it inhabits in my body. How it taunts the anger that sat in a slow simmer for so long, ready for the taking at a moment’s notice. I have eaten at this table willingly and often for generations. War and anger have kept me full.
Anger wants me to take a side. Anger wants me to bring back the captured, the hijacked, the murdered, the abducted, the flattened, the bombed, the displaced, the disenfranchised. Anger wants me ALL IN to make right something that simply should not be happening. Anger wants to recruit me to its army of fear.
I refuse.
It would be so much easier to choose a side. There’s such relief in saying, “I’m with them,” or “I’m with them.” I guess this is why people love sports teams so much: there’s a feeling of belonging, of completion. So wily, so deceptive, teasing me into choosing a right and a wrong.
What if there is no side? It’s not us versus them, it’s us versus us. It’s the division inside of us that’s causing the division outside of us. I know this intimately.
When I woke up, I remembered I am called to a different path, a harder path – not by choice. It’s simply the way I must walk. This path has no rails, and no train. It has no sides. It has no us, and no them. This path requires me not to hold one side or the other, but to grow the capacity to hold the chasm itself.
That’s when I was reminded to write again.
Thank you Ravya for writing. And not just “writing about” but sharing your depths with us… The quote that the other person called out from your writing reminds me of a quote, I come back to From Vijay Gupta. He is the founder of “Street Symphony” where they play music not for, but with the people of Skid Row and Los Angeles. I heard him speak at a conference on mass incarceration. He said, “we ostracize and criminalize and exile the most fragile and vulnerable people in our society, because we ostracize and criminalize and exile the most fragile and vulnerable parts of ourselves. “
I am deeply moved that ‘the division inside of me causes me to create divisions outside of me,’ and for the invitation to ‘not to hold one side or the other, but to grow the capacity to hold the chasm itself.’ Your writing is healing me, Ravya.