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Historians and scientists observe current phenomena as compression and acceleration of history itself. Rarely is there such disruption on a global scale, and the time-matter warp is destabilizing across society and nations.
Anything that was falling apart prior to the pandemic is crumbling faster. Ideas that were on the rise prior to the pandemic — irrespective of their placement on the ideological spectrum — are gaining ground beyond the expectations or organizing power of their most ardent supporters. Compression and acceleration are values neutral, with added momentum and heft.
It is important to understand that this state of affairs did not suddenly overtake us. The aggregation of poverty and wealth, not as a continuum but as a great divide dependent on its continuation. Racial animus. The privileging of health, jobs, voting, education, personhood. Violence as a tool and product of control and power as much as a loss of control and powerlessness. Denial of responsibility of global environmental phenomena tied to a destiny of human control over global environmental phenomena. Indiscriminate othering. These are behaviors, beliefs, and conditions that have been in the making for hundreds and thousands of years —multiplied and diminished, distorted, pushed for and against... but rarely healed, re-membered, embraced as a wholistic puzzle worthy of embrace.
The chaos of the moment is a weather system from which we cannot escape, even by pretending that a return to normalcy is just around the corner. It is spectacular non-fiction and the human toll is real. The deaths, illnesses, struggling to make ends meet, randomly deliberate violence, casting out and casting aside. If you are fearful and grieving, then you are having a normal human response to the conditions of the times and of the world. There is a sense that no one is coming to save us. And yet, everyday, all around us, ordinary people, the people of the commons, the maka’ainana arise each day and stock the shelves, don PPE, volunteer at food banks, step up by the tens of thousands and take the place of aging poll workers, muster yet another day of home-schooling on a skinny band.
More than anything else, this is a time of paradox. The structures that have been pushed against - from the left and the right - with fierceness and political resolve cannot stand and yet we are counting on these same disintegrating structures to answer, respond, provide across the vastness of human need. Unprecedented paradox, paradoxically, is unprecedented opportunity. If “returning to normalcy” is insufficient - a resigned stepping back, a move that may even be dangerous - why not spring forward instead?
Why not!
Leaping forward as a response-ability in a moment of fractious acceleration is best embraced as a stepping into collective acceleration. Forming into and out of the collective is an interruption of the supremacy of the individual. It recognizes that whileEveryPerson is a (s)hero, the time of reliance and dependence on selected individuals to lead has long passed. Instead, we are called to collective stewardship of the whole.
To move beyond and in spite of the fierce binary, toward wholeness that comes from wholeness, requires a radical reset. Our ancestor Grace Lee Boggs summed it up on a favorite sweatshirt: “(R)Evolution”. To have a productive revolution we must evolve. (R)Evolution is a way of collective acceleration to leap forward beyond the force of implosion. How? By resetting in and relearning what it means to move toward wholeness that comes from wholeness in our everyday lives and exercising the muscle memory of wholeness to chart a course toward the communities and world circumstances that we desire. This is the kind of evolution that needs to be much more than a mere adaptation to fractious dissolution. It is not enough to merely survive as a mutation of ourselves and compromisingly devolve in values, expectations and actions.
This is the kind of evolution that resets who we need to be. The better angels spoken of by poets and leaders are not external beings that call to us. We are the ones becoming better angels. It will not be easy. Darkness gathers in the airless void, and we are drawn to it as the means to protect, defends, avenge.
We will need to make and execute plans to navigate the sinkhole of implosion: make the concrete means for the joyful well-being of as large a circle as we have mutual relationships — pilina — with, making no assumptions of any system or institution being able to do so on our behalf. Part of our preparation of reset is a clearing of the decks.
What are we engaged in (time, resources, heart equity, brain power) that is about more of the same? What baggage are we holding on to, hoping that it will be useful someday?What are we overloaded with, not being able to say no? The acceleration part of collective acceleration will require some of us to travel fast and light, and others to bore deeply into a single endeavor. Both courses and roles require a clearing of the decks.Greater capacity does not come from a full cup. What may be awaits our choices.
In mutuality, interwoven in our relationships, healing as we go and stepping audaciously into the reconnection of who we are becoming, this leap. And in doing so, our leap forward reconnects to source.
A writing for the Art of Waging Peace Across Generations In Collective Acceleration, an intensive. Edited from a writing of October 2020. Held by One Leaf.
Collective acceleration graphic art, by Claudia Lopez
Photo of Moment of Release, special effects upon the original photo by Tanouye Tenshin Rotaishi
English: "Our leap forward connects us to source"
Spanish: "Nuestro salto hacia adelante reconecta con la fuente"
Hawaiian: "ʻO ko kākou hoʻokāʻoi he hoʻopili hou i ka mole"