Skip to main content

The Benefits of Imagining You Were Shipwrecked

So, last March, you were shipwrecked on a deserted island.

For the first month, you were in shock. And assumed it was temporary. There were novel things - crab everywhere! You arranged stones to say SOS on the beach. You made a fire, so the search plane could find you. You waited to be rescued.

The second month, your hope for immediate rescue was ebbing. You began grieving. You thought of the ordinary things you had taken for granted. Your shock turned to denial. This couldn't really be happening. You have a golf tournament scheduled for the end of the month!

Third month, you began accepting that not only is this real, but it could be this way for quite a while. The makeshift shelter isn't ideal. There are probably better ways to store water than coconut shells. Maybe you could weave a hammock to sleep in.

As I wrote about last week, I don't believe the rescue plane is going to be coming for us anytime soon. There may be some waxing and waning over the next year, as we have lower risk phases where we can do more together, before going back to limited contact. But I don't think we're close enough to knowing what that will look like to make plans for that "mixed" reality.

I have spent so many days doing the educated equivalent of shaking a Magic 8 Ball. Did you ever have one of those as a kids? You asked it a question, gave it a shake, then read the message. And to be honest, if you didn't like the answer, you'd just keep asking the question and shaking the ball until you got the answer you wanted.

How many hours have I spent doing that? Reading articles, studying the models, trying to anticipate when this pandemic will end, and we can get back to normal? Hours and hours. And it's good to be informed, to seek out clear, science-informed knowledge. But beyond a certain point, I'm just shaking the Magic 8 Ball, hoping it will give me the answer I desire, that by this fall, everything will more or less be back to normal.

But that's not what the models are saying.

Perhaps it would be better for us to treat this more like the metaphor of the deserted island. So what do we do?

That's what I'll be writing about this week.

Tomorrow: "Shipwrecked: 1) Assess Resources"







Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Me and My Collar

You may run into me on a Friday, in my neighborhood, so it's time I let you know what you might see. When I was doing my required unit of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), my supervisor suggested that any of us who came from traditions where a clerical collar was an option, take one "collar week," to see how we were treated, as opposed to wearing regular professional clothes. After a couple of days, I joked to the Catholic priest, "How do you manage the power?" In regular clothes, I would walk into a patient's room, and it would take about 5 or so minutes of introductions and pleasantries before we could really get down to talking about their feelings, their fears, the deep stuff. With most people, as soon as that clerical collar walked in the room, with me attached, they began pouring out all the heavy stuff they were carrying. I was riding the bus back and forth every day, and though not quite so dramatic, the collar effect was alive there, to...

Beloved Community: The Now and Not Yet

Rev. Christine Robinson has a great little post up about the phrase "beloved community" and why it's problematic to use that to describe a church. Like her mom, I can get cranky about the whole thing, but my crankiness lies in the misuse of what is, to me, such a breathtaking and profound concept. Martin Luther King, Jr., someone whose words I study in great detail, is the one we often think of as originating the term, but he learned about it through the writings of Josiah Royce. Josiah Royce (right) with close friend William James.  Royce was a philosopher, studying Kant, Hegel. I imagine he would have enjoyed Koestler's theory of the holon , because he saw humanity as being both individuals and part of a greater "organism" that was community. As King's belief about Beloved Community would be rooted in agape , Royce's philosophy stemmed from what he called loyalty, and by that he meant, "the practically devoted love of an individual f...

"The Lifesaving Virtue of Hopelessness"

Hopelessness as a virtue? Wait, wait, Universalism is "The Larger Hope," and we (wrongly attributed to John Murray) exhort people to "Give them, not Hell, but hope and courage," and we sing about bringing hope, when hope is hard to find. Hopelessness can be a virtue? Yes. In Necessary Endings, Henry Cloud writes: If you are looking for the formula that can get you motivated and fearless, here it is: you must finally see reality for what it is—in other words, that what is not working is not going to magically begin working. If something isn’t working , you must admit that what you are doing to get it to work is hopeless. This chapter is about the lifesaving virtue of hopelessness. The awareness of hopelessness is what finally brings people to the reality of the pruning moment. It is the moment when they wake up, realize that an ending must occur, and finally feel energized to do it. Nothing mobilizes us like a firm dose of reality. Whether it is finally getti...