Crisis, desperation, opportunity

June 7, 2020

Just finished a zoom training with our Singy karatekas, followed by some solitary kata practice. Always feel a bit optimistic after. Good time to write perhaps J

Yesterday I saw this fb ad for education, ‘Turn crisis into opportunity,’ it said. Learn new skills etc. etc. I felt like hitting something. I had skyped with my friend in Utah on Friday and we had spoken of ourselves and how heavy and unmotivated we were feeling about doing anything. It was uncanny how similar our inner states were and our behaviour too. I felt good, as I could laugh about the terrible habits and patterns I had developed during the pandemic. We also spoke of George Floyd and racism, and the migrant labour in India, and of course about Modi and Trump. We had talked about how both had sneaked in projects that would harm the environment during this time when people were dazed and in lockdown. Both were consolidating their power, both had very active fake news sites, and the followers of both believed in them even more than before. I thought the US was better off than India as the opposition was more credible but she didn’t agree. We spoke of how we were sponges to the field around – soaking in emotions from the surrounding which often made us feel limp. We ended the conversation talking about our hair, very short cuts and the shape of our heads. 

After I saw the ad about Crisis into Opportunity I went back to this conversation. Millionaires had managed to increase their net worth. Authoritarian political leaders had managed to grab more control. Opportunity in Crisis. I thought the real opportunities should be about seeing the fault lines in our way of life -- environmental damage, excessive consumption, disparity and extreme poverty and malnutrition -- and correcting those. We weren’t moving in those directions though activists were screaming about them. So yes, I wanted to hit something. 

The emotion I had been feeling all week was best described by desperation. It totally engulfed me. It was so intense that I couldn’t write about it here, so I wrote with pen on paper. Stone grey ink on soft beige paper. After the first two sentences about my personal desperation the rest were stories I had seen or heard. The one I had heard that morning was about men, who had college degrees, that they could not afford to have paid for, now doing farm labour – just to feed their families. Desperation. More and more sinking into poverty. I doubt if any of them saw opportunity in the crisis.

After his attempts to help me, emerge a bit from the ferocity of the feelings that were making me say that I couldn’t find any meaning in life, failed, my spouse googled ‘how to deal with desperation’. Three things were common in several articles – gratitude, abundance and seeing it as a choice not to feel it. I had tried the first two – lists of things I was grateful for were scattered all over my journal during these weeks, as were all the things I had abundance of (many I didn’t need at all). But they were just lists, experienced by my intellect and not by the body and heart, and choice – no I couldn’t feel that yet. Desperation holds every cell of the body and soul in an unbreakable grip. 

After I spoke with my friend in Utah, I took clippers and worked them through my hair. The result is patchy, a ton of bald spots – especially on the left -- and the back is longer than the front as my spouse didn’t have the heart to clip it off as close to the scalp as I had in the front. It looks truly terrible. But I can see the shape of my head. I like it and I do feel better.