I’ve been feeling a weight, a
kind of yoke, a sense of being part of a lineage of responsibility. It is heavy
weight, one that makes thinking hard. I want to pause and reflect, to use this
Slow Lane opportunity to do justice to what I’ve inherited, and to serve the
past best by going beyond it. It feels very daring, heretical even, to
acknowledge the wisdom of the past, and to seek the unknown wisdom of the
present.
There is so much I owe our
ancestors. I am here, it is my time to pitch in, and do my part, to make my
contribution to the journey of our kind. I feel a deep family obligation. It is
a strangely joyful bond, filled with blood, darkness, hunger and awe — and, above all, Mystery. As surely as my
blood circulates, the ancestors give me Life. I am humbled before them, and
their contributions, and encouraged to “keep going.”
So, it is not without
sobriety and reverence, that I look into the travesty of this moment, and face the
fact, that my ancestors, and the ones who came before them, didn’t live in a
world/gestalt like this one. The wisdom of tradition offers us tremendous
value, a sense of deeply reassuring continuity. Their wisdom, as good as it is,
just doesn’t adequately address the utterly new challenges that assail us now.
Here’s what I mean.
I feel like I’m wandering off
a high cliff when I host these notions, I mean no disrespect, but I have to
live in this world. The world of my indigenous forbears was a lot larger than the
one I live in. People in those days belonged to a place, and had some things in
common with the folks around them. They didn’t have the good fortune, nor the
challenges, that diversity presents this generation with. They labored, some
might say benefited by, a single reality-construct. They were in it together,
and for most, anyone else was suspect.
We still have some of those
tendencies. The other isn’t always welcome around the fire now, either. But, in
our world thankfully, and sometimes mystifyingly, others are crowded around us.
Reality has become a calico cat, comprised of colors that have never been seen
before. The Mystery, if one can believe it, has become even more complex.
I have lived my entire 69
years, in a human world that knows, at least in some corners, that we humans
now have the power to put an end to all complex life. Never did our ancestors
have to face that kind of horrifyingly sobering and anxiety-producing awareness.
Never. A part of my daily reality is unimaginable to them. Our existential
apprehensions have grown.
We, so-called modern humans,
have terra-formed a reality on Earth that has not existed before, and we can’t
look exclusively backwards for wisdom now. The past offers us the tried and
formerly true, but it doesn’t give us much insight into what faces us today.
Our ancestral voices call to us with the same kind of innocence that our
childhood was infused with. Growing up means letting go of the past.
But, what else does it mean?
I don’t have answers to that question. Neither does my father’s father, or the
many fathers and mothers that came before him. There is a new uncertainty loose
in the world.
I don’t have hope, just a
deep regard for Life. I think Life, in what may take another billion years,
knows what it is doing. Maybe, it’s going to educate us, in which case what we
know will be helpful, but probably will not be up to the future. It’s what we
don’t know, and how well we respond to it (the unknown) that will determine how
long we stick around. In the end, I think it is unknown wisdom, which is going
to give us a chance.
As I walk (or wheel) into the
darkness of the unknown, I hear, most loudly, the call, not of my ancestors,
but of those who want to come, for whom, being here, is a precious chance to
exist.
