Offering: April 14, 2024
Offering: April 14, 2024
Anxiety & adjustment
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I’ve had a ton of anxiety over the years about publishing, social media, and being perceived by people I don’t know or trust and it’s worse than it’s been in a while. I’ve spent a lot of time this past year thinking about grief as a path toward unusual knowledges, and one of the unusual-to-me things that I’m learning is that when I don’t feel good about something it doesn’t always mean I’m not doing it right, or need to make an internal adjustment. Sometimes things on the outside need changing and I’m learning to notice and accept when they do.
Thankfully I’ve had great things to read through these harried days, one of which is Sara Ahmed’s Feminist Killjoy Handbook. Ahmed writes that being a feminist killjoy is about “what we are willing to keep encountering,” and that “if questioning an existing arrangement makes people unhappy, we are willing to make people unhappy.” There are a lot of arrangements I’d like to question, but today I’m thinking about how willing I am to question the ones in my own life. And about myself as the one who’d be temporarily “unhappy” with such questioning, so that adjustments could be made that need making.
I’ve also been reading philosopher Ami Harbin’s book Disorientation in Moral Life, and thinking about how disorientation can yield moral clarity. If I had to give a name to what I’m willing to experience so that change can happen I’d probably call it disorientation more than unhappiness. I’m not that attached to happiness to begin with, plus I’ve felt so uncertain these last months about so many things and I’m just not sure how much more I can stomach.
But because, as philosopher Hannah Arendt has said, “I cannot live without at least trying to understand whatever happens,1” I read books to find footing in confusing times. And Harbin’s book on disorientation is keeping me in touch with the possibility that if I’m willing to endure just a little bit more uncertainty, I might get the chance to make values, invent myself, and discern a path in ways I feel good about.
I like the idea of making values as opposed to discovering or uncovering them because once we have a sense of this ability to make, we might be more aware that we can perpetually make, un-make, and re-make in the long run. But Harbin wants to be clear that the making of values through disorientation will not amount to some ultimate achievement of virtuousness that is “static,” “enduring” or “global.” Instead, whatever emerges through the experience of not knowing how to go on will be “dynamic; in some cases temporary; and expressed only in select areas of life.”
I guess “I have commitment issues,” so this is a much-needed relief. Whatever decisions I make about how to move forward are not now, nor will they ever be, my final answer to the world on what matters. For Harbin, the ability to make values that can come through disorientation isn’t about strengthening or stabilizing our abilities to act ethically. Experiences of disorientation instead “attune individuals to the particularities of an unjust moral landscape in ways that allow them to respond well to it in some ways, for some period of time.” None of this is permanent. And I take this again as a massive relief.
A few weeks ago, my sister sent me a clip from a CNN segment about the disappearing beach in Salisbury, Massachusetts which is minutes from where we grew up. The reporter begins by noting that over the last fifty years, the ocean’s claimed more and more of the beach. In response to this loss, the people who own the very expensive beachfront properties have trucked in sand by the ton twice a decade.
Most recently they pooled their resources to buy and haul six hundred thousand dollars’ worth of sand in hopes it would protect what they’ve built. But then a big storm came and washed away over half of the sand in one day. The president of an organization called Salisbury Beach Citizens for Change is interviewed for the segment and calls the dunes sacrificial. “They did their job” he says, “only it cost us three hundred thousand dollars.”
The president of Salisbury Beach Citizens for Change does not believe in climate change but does hope that the state will fund future dunes; like pricey sacrifices to Poseidon who may be appeased by the offerings, and back off. It may take millions more dollars of trucked in sand to protect the two billion dollars worth of property, but for the members of Salisbury Beach Citizens for Change, the other option—of saying goodbye—is unthinkable.
The world is really unfair. So many of those who can afford to mourn won’t, while people who want to honor their losses can’t find the space or the time. At the same time I have so much compassion for people who just can’t let go. I’m often that person, until forced. I’m working hard to pay closer attention to the internal shifts that indicate change could be good, and making adjustments before something steps in to adjust me.