Hi, all, Daniel-of-2018, here,
Gosh, that was awful, the early days of Sarah's diagnosis. We all thought both that she had to be cured, must be cured (or proven not really sick in the first place) and that she would be. A kind of hopeless hopefulness. In time we discovered neither was true.
I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, but it's worth saying that there's a tendency to believe that life is the plans that we make, the hopes and ideals and expectations, and that illness and accident and all of that is the interruption, stuff you deal with so you can get back to living your life. Except the interruptions never stop, and there are no interruptions, because it's all life.
That was the central lesson I was supposed to be teaching Steve, I think, but I was slow to understand it myself.
Much of the politics of the past year and a half have seemed like an interruption, an aberration I can't quite believe in, now that the first shock is over. We're ok, as long as "we" is defined narrowly. I suppose "we" are always ok, until suddenly we aren't, and the important thing is how narrowly "we" must be defined to remain ok. Greg often reminds us of this, as does Steve.
And so, we continue to act, deliberately, if we have to, as though this unbelievable turn of the nation's fortunes is real, and worth doing something about. We do this by acting on our convictions, making a safe and sacred space, and sharing it. We have a small community again, about thirty students total who have passed the entrance exam, plus about sixty or seventy more who are frequent attendees of our various public workshops and events.
We are interrupting the interruption.
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