Short Walks in Downtown, Searching for the Light

I am using this letter to call to you.

Seattle has been basking in sunlight for what seems like every single day we’ve ever been alive. That’s what happens when the sun is shining here; I forget all the other days when it did not shine. I forget that there are other places where the sun also shines. It feels like we alone get the best of the sun.

Because I live on a higher floor of a building that’s been around since the 1930s, built to retain heat, warmer days also mean that my apartment becomes a hotbox. So I’ve been sleeping with the window open, trying unsuccessfully to “tune out” any number of noises which could range from intoxicated tourists making their way back to their hotels to people fighting with each other or their demons. Falling asleep isn’t exactly a quiet or pleasant experience; it’s more of a fight to the finish.

But I get to wake up to a gentle breeze and feel the sun pour onto my skin, the leaves of the tree outside my window swaying gently. Sometimes there is even the chirping of birds. It is by far my favorite way to start my days. And a good thing, too, because the days have been hard.

My walks this week have been quick turns around my neighborhood, often ending up somewhere near the market or the waterfront. Most evenings after work I set out absentmindedly and end up on Virginia heading toward 1st Avenue and either keep going toward the water or turn into the market, letting myself get lost among the crowds of the tourists and the shops that are trying to spring back into some form of whatever they used to be before everything changed. I have needed the distraction and the infusion of people who are not online, who are not talking but existing in their own lives. There, but not there.

I do not think that I need to say what’s obvious, but there is so much suffering everywhere and it feels like there’s nothing most of us can do but raise awareness by sharing misery back and forth in our digital spaces, liking and sharing images that are hard to process, just to ease the feeling of helplessness. I do it because I don’t know what else to do but I reached critical mass this week. After over a year of what feels like relentless anger against all of the ways our humanity suffers, I just could not engage anymore.

Yes, we are social creatures and we are meant to exist in community but that community was never supposed to be billions of people. We were not made to engage at this level with every thought and feeling of so many people all the time. In the best of times, when it’s all just noise and marketing, it’s unproductive to the cultivation of our own ideas. But at times like these, when it’s filled with the breaking hearts and spirits of our fellow humans, it is traumatizing to constantly bear witness to the suffering. You sit alone with your phone or computer and you hold your breath while you watch someone’s shaky video of people screaming in fear and pain, children running scared, somewhere far away but also right there in the palm of your hands.

I believe strongly in civic engagement, in brave and wide-eyed confrontation of the geopolitical and economic forces that shape our world. But I am at a place now where I just do not know what to do other than hold space for the reality that this is really, really a lot. I want to acknowledge that we have become conditioned to seek absolutes and that the digital space (especially social media), by design, favors volatility over nuance. “UNBELIEVABLE!” is likely to be shared more widely than “it may be hard to believe when you consider factors xyz in your analysis.” 

I am trying to practice gently reminding myself that the task of “spreading awareness” does not always fall to me and that my friends probably belong to the same worldview as I do, so we’re probably getting our news from similar sources. I am trying to be selective with what I share. At the very least, I am trying to see if there is an action that is attached to a post because I’m a task-oriented person and I need to feel like I am “doing something” more than just spreading narratives, even if I agree with that worldview. It’s hard, and it’s easy to feel like a traitor or an evil person because you aren’t doing at least this small thing of amplifying the voices of the oppressed.

I hope for conversations, tender and vulnerable and open to the belief that we need each other. Understanding that we as individuals are not the keepers of the systems causing all of this suffering.

I have no idea how to do it right but wherever you are, I really hope that you are okay.

___

There’s no Something to Cook this week. I do not have it in me to write about measurements and cook times.