From whence we came to where we go

Occasionally, I melt into emotional complexity. In the mornings, it's fairly predictable that a cup of coffee down the street from my house on my adopted patio, or even in my own room, will likely force the seeds of tears to try to germinate at the simple contrast of a chord change, a sentimental expression, an article describing a nook of the world moving in the direction I think it ought to, indeed, be moving. With the aroma of awakening wafting through a room, I might slide into basic realization of what it's all about. A semblance of hope - feeling, amplified.

Other times, the onslaught of calm emotion is less predictable. Tonight, in the laughing goat, the wine was not yet poured. My bag not yet unpacked. My book, my journal not yet on the table. But suddenly, I was broadsided by the mood.

I imagine it has something to do with community - with the fact that in this particular coffee shop the music doesn't demand our full attention - but it is there; perched at the back of the room with guitar in hand, lips practically smacking the microphone, shooting forth my generation's somewhat simplified versions of sonata form. The sounds wave gently past local art and local faces; smatterings of robust colors - green radiating mysterious contemplation, blue highlighting hypnosis, and red hinting at reluctant seduction. There is occasional applause (and the ever-present possibility that someone might buy a painting), but undivided attention is not mandatory. We might be here anyway, of course - if KBCO or mass-produced, instantly replicable mp3's (their creativity diminished with every download) replaced live human creation. But they don't. They aren't. And so together we are witness to at least one thing - one note, one chord, one word, one song - that no one outside of this room (or the street outside) can possibly be witness to.

I realize that one of the burdens and one of the beauties of a world of individuals is that we all live individually. My walk down the street is not your walk down the street, regardless of your proximity to me as we walk down the street. But if I walk down the alley from my house - my eyes are a culture away from your eyes, 1/2 block south on Pearl Street. As my feet gradually become covered in alley dirt with every forward step, yours remain sequestered from the earth atop paved walks. As trees engulf my sky, as my world becomes a green jungle, your sky remains bright as coffee shop after coffee shop drives home the reality we're both used to. My stroll forces me to thought, while me-yesterday rolls pushing pedals on Walnut with thoughts only of tasks upon arrival at the final destination. There do exist varying magnitudes in distinction.

Here, at the laughing goat, together again, we have been thrust into unified experience - a shop with character, with tables that rock back and forth, and with music that didn't exist a second ago. Shared creation - for it would not be created at all if it weren't to be shared - is as it should be.

The America of today sprints through life more than ever before. We have more information than any generation past, and can have it now. And when a system mandating growth faces the realities of a culture demanding something new every few minutes (forgetting to question why); and when we forget that we all live individually and that we, alone, are responsible for our decisions - of what to consume as much or even more than of what to produce - we end with community refusing to pay for the very things it wants, needs, and desires. What's more, in the middle of a crash noisy enough to wake the dead, we find people asleep - paying for what they think can get them more of whatever it is they, and society, have termed better. With the deterioration well under way, we find a population unable to swallow the fact that we have been marching in the wrong direction; that instead pushes to get back to that place from where we came. We find businesses frantically filling gaps in the market without considering which of those gaps should, indeed, be filled. We end with the thinkers feeling forced to say more, faster rather than less, better.

We need to slow down. And we need to do it in the right ways. The highest virtue of slower places is that we might live closer to the source - we might see the roots of sustenance as our ancestors once did. In these places we are forced into to deeper creativities as ease is difficult to come by. And in those places, we simply place the seeds, pour the water, and watch life bloom - and are humbled by our inability to explain the reasons why.

We can never go back, of course. But we can strike a balance between contradictions - between our ceaseless drive toward something better, to a place where fate is communal; and a recognized nobility of holding onto the humility of the past where the individual stood alone and defenseless against the vast armies of the earth.

If we don't aim for the center, and instead climb back up to the road from which we were thrown, or aim for an improbable return to our original humble vulnerabilities, we will fail as humanity. But "The blood of slaves reminds us that pragmatism can sometimes be moral cowardice."* We must be relentlessly individual in responsibility for our lives - and we must restlessly question every decision we might be expected to make that might drive us from the middle way.

And we must do it together.







*Barack Obama - The Audacity of Hope