#newnarrative

I searched in my mind during that glorious summer sunset and this came into view. Myriads of moments with people flashing by - an autumn Sunday in a park in Torino, watching snowfall on a lake in the Morvan on Christmas day, a night walk by the Isère river in January, cups of midnight tea in my studio back when I was in Paris... I didn’t mention people, but I was with people, I was with them and it felt good. That was surprising, when these memories came rushing into view, because people are not necessarily an element that I would naturally count in. But it happened that way, so I tried to understand why. And I guessed I really treasured these profound and intimate connections - the exchange of thoughts and ideas - that we shared in that one fraction of time. Not emotions, it’s easy to share an emotion because it’ll come and go, so fleeting & non-stable. But thoughts & ideas are something more permanent, so I have to trust you to a certain point to share with you these well-crafted and/or carefully collected thoughts & ideas. And so I thought, oh, maybe the narratives that I’ve been telling about myself, all that being self-sufficient and always taking the high road and not depending on people have brought me so far, but maybe it is time to adopt a new narrative for further growth. Because well, what brought you here will not get you there. And because it felt nice in those memories in which there were people that I love. And so I thought to myself, hey, this means you don’t have to be alone anymore, and heck, you can rely on people. Because they will listen to you, and you can share your thoughts and ideas and they won’t find it weird. You are no longer that little girl who had to defend for herself against a predatory grand-bitch-father, or had to defend someone else - a father crippled by his own defeats, a mother way too fragile in front of life, a sister who is tougher than you but she’s still your little sister that you needed to protect, or a brother who didn’t get your way of processing things. Etcetera and etcetera.  And so I thought hey you’ve grown now and none of that can get to you anymore. And the most incredible thing was that - you’ve met so many new people. Those who are on the same wavelengths as you, those who are wired differently but still meet your insights and therefore add new fun perspectives, those who don’t find it strange that you need a ridiculous amount of alone time - precisely to recharge in order to come back to them with more interesting ideas that they’ll be glad to hear. What a happiness it is, to be understood.  And so I got off that rock when the sun was set. As we were about to get our stuff to the boat to depart from the island, I asked a friend whether everyone should take care of their own stuff, whether “chacun sa merde” I said - “everyone minding their own business”. And he said no dear, let’s not go down that path again. 

So I chose to follow a different one. 

May the best among us, the most visionary, the most inclusive, be the imaginal cells—for now we are in the soup. The outcome of disasters is not foreordained. It’s a conflict, one that takes place while things that were frozen, solid and locked up have become open and fluid – full of both the best and worst possibilities. We are both becalmed and in a state of profound change.

In a 2015 Manifesto called Radical Tenderness, Dani d’Emilia and Daniel B. Chávez writes: “radical tenderness is to not collapse in the face of our contradictions… is to have peripheral vision; to believe in what cannot be seen.”

The words are hauntingly evocative, prophetic, and profound. The chaos and conflicts threatening us daily are overwhelming, and it is easy to sink into despair and a desperate yearning for some semblance of stability and certainty.

The pandemic, however, can be a portal towards a regenerative future inviting us to hospice what no longer works, and to midwife the new. If only we can “believe in what cannot be seen”.

For the full article: Reimagining a Regenerative Future-Part 1