Crisis Will Set You Free

“Never let a serious crisis go to waste.”

A favorite saying of Rahm Emanuel’s. And a fundamental truism. Crisis is where we created social security, public works, Obamacare and heck, if you go back far enough where we made a country and later abolished its biggest sin. Today it’s where Bernie should be pointing out the glaring holes and shortcomings in our system and where Biden should be showing he’s the leader equipped to address them and steady us.

Crisis is where Christ wandered the desert and carried the cross, where Joseph sat in the pit, where Luke Skywalker found out Vader’s true identity and Bruce Wayne clutched pearls in an alley.

But what does it mean for us? No one wants crisis and if anything we’re prone to push it out of the way for more comfortable, numbing agents. But crisis is often where we meet catharsis, where we actualize and where we level up. It happens in small ways all the time that we don’t appreciate until we’ve surmounted them. The project at work that makes you nervous. The last rep at the gym when your body is shaking. Having that conversation you didn’t want to, but needed to. Even putting away the dishes.

But these habitual challenges are training wheels compared to the world we’re in right now.

Suddenly, as a society, we are collectively launched into the Act II conflict of all our stories.

And we shouldn’t let the crisis go to waste.

On a macro level I hope unplugging society and then plugging it back in will help with glitches in our OS. Which is to say — there’s things that need fixing. Years worth of headlines and tweets let us know that. Updates on shortages and rising numbers otherwise don’t fail to remind us.

But what does it mean where we live? In the houses and apartments where we’re sheltered in place and more importantly, in the souls, psyches and minds sheltered within us?

We are in a unique moment we might not see again for the rest of our lives. And in a way, we’re getting exactly what we all said we always wanted.

Not a plague. Despite IG meme-nihilism. A chance. Time. We are suddenly stripped of excuses and engagements. Granted, this is not true of everyone — this crisis is not effecting us all evenly. But the opportunity it provides has universal applications.

When I spent days of the freedom I’d spent years yearning for playing hours of Words With Friends against strangers, half-watching talking heads, all while baggage new and old simmered in me on background in a slow cooker, I realized I was badly botching a moment — and marinating in easy, but unnecessary, capitulation.

We have all been forced to stop. That is the ideal time to keep going.

Not to the bar. Not to the movies. Not to a show. Within ourselves. Stopping is the easy part, in the sense that a couch is more comfortable to sit on than a run is to mount. But pushing ourselves further will free us.

Every story you love sucks if your favorite character gives up when it goes wrong. Every athlete we admire doesn’t exist without unlocking their excellence. The text of our culture is overflowing with overcoming. Now’s the opportunity for each of us to tell that story for ourselves.

Never let a serious crisis go to waste.

You have a to do list of the soul. An essence rusted by commitments, necessities and obligations. A meaning drowned out by noise. A faith battered by circumstance. Find it. Embrace it. Bring it back into the light.

Because of this crisis we are all on our own Waldens, our own Thoureaus. So let’s get transcendental. What makes you you that isn’t a distraction? Let’s all determine, and determine to do that thing.

I’m suddenly FaceTiming with people I’d only normally message or text with, missing the sound of laughter and the art only faces can paint. I’m reaching out to people who have kept stock in my heart, even if the wandering road of life has left them without recent appearances. And I’m remembering how important my closest friends and family are, not accessories to life, but the stuff that makes it.

And beyond virtual happy hours and mutual commiseration I’m finding for myself that this … wtf-iest of times… is also having the odd side effect of unwinding something that had be coiled in me by the all the obligation and distraction as previously mentioned.

The quiet hours, uninterrupted by social envy, not second guessed by options, can be the grounds in which we replant ourselves.

The death of FOMO doesn’t have to be mourned, in fact maybe it should be celebrated.

This does mean a conscious decision to put down an app to pick up ourselves. To break a habit or redirect a reflex to be intentional. It does take faith over fear. An embrace of “do what you can” over “worry about what you can’t control”. It might even mean expanding the borders on our comfort zones as we do something as simple as talk to a neighbor or as complex as doing the steady, incremental, but fulfilling work of a personal project or of the soul.

As markets reel and politicians fumble it’s an opportunity to disconnect from dominating cycles of “need to know” and reconnect to and mend the places in our lives that need healing and renewing, neglected because of the very cycles that demand our attention, and can wear on our person.

It’s an opportunity to ask ourselves what we often do but hardly ever really answer, “what am I doing?” Because there’s so much we can all do. The changes we make in ourselves in this crisis can change our worlds once it’s over.

These are the reps of our souls. The crux of our stories. This is when we decide to run away into old habits and new defeats, or whatever heroism looks like for us. Engage. Remember. Rebuild. Have faith in yourself.

Listen to the album that used to bring you to tears in HS, and see if that person’s still there. Write down your feelings. Paint the canvas. Create. Don’t be ashamed of it.

If you have it to spare, give. If you don’t, find the best ways to share your time instead.

Stretch yourself. On a yoga mat, in your id. Talk to Mom. Process your anxiety. Walk and appreciate the sky’s vast color and steady indifference to our worry.

Prioritize what’s really ever been the only priority: people and you. Your spirit.

We are walking the desert, fasting in a way, and we will be tempted by devils. But we have never lived by hashtags, new restaurants, exclusive events, or where we go to work alone, and maybe that was never what life was really supposed to be all about.

There’s no montage for the moment we’re in. No card that says “6 months later” before fading in on what the world will be and who we’ll become. If we’re going to be Batman, we have to train and build the cave and take our scrapes along the way, and not collapse while the pearls bounce down the alley. If we’re going to topple the Empire, the story can’t end in the swamp where we hide after we get bad news. If we’re going to unlock our potential, we have to work, and work at reconnecting to our spirit first and foremost.

If we can take this crisis, this reboot, and come out better versions of who we are that will be the victory we’re yearning for, the catharsis we need, the story we ought to tell.

As an optimist and believer by background and nature I’ve been reminded how it’s easy to say everything will be fine when it is. Or that things will work out when you don’t have to be a truly active participant in the work of making it work out.

But today, in spite of the crisis, and maybe oddly because of it, I’m finding that faith strengthened and a peace I haven’t hung out with in a while. I find it connecting to the things that are bigger as all the things that are smaller are being stripped away. I find it when I’m invigorated by doing the work of the self or of my passions, and in embracing the simple joys and deeper truths that form the unshakable foundations of that very peace. Even in the collective clarity of being in something together as a community.

There is calm in this storm.

We have to do it together, but we can save the day, All we have to do is stay inside, order chicken (or an Impossible burger), and if we can, become less cluttered, clearer versions of ourselves. People that are present in our own lives. In this story it is our challenge to actualize. For once in our whole lives, we’ve got the time.

This morning I poured coffee. Listened to music. Wrote. Texted friends fresh “how are you?”-s?

One of my best friends texted to tell me she spent the morning lizard hunting in her family’s yard with her daughters, 4 and 2 years old. When it comes to what’s important right now, that might be all I need to know.

Don’t let the crisis go to waste.