This day before election, tension is like a membrane stretched as tight as it can be in all directions and so thin there’s almost light shining through. Anything that makes the slightest nick, at this point, could cause the world to explode. What a great time for an ex machina resolution.
Some majestic on a white horse carrying a shield so bright we’re dazzled by it, and a sword with a name that doesn’t have to do much lopping before we’re all convinced that, aah, things are going to be okay. Order and regularity restored. Tension relaxed into rest. We can breathe.
Freshness is not such a savior. We’ve not been watched from the transcendent by an increasingly impatient being pondering when or if to intervene to save our bacon before it’s too late.
I know this because freshness is always already here, “present whenever I, or any, open or are open to your or anyone’s potentiality, energy, power”, as the prayer says. Encounters occur all the time, instigated by freshness, pervaded by freshness, and furthered forever by freshness.
I feel I need someone or something extraordinary and dramatic at this particular moment to cut through the compounding unbearability of today’s expectancy. The idea of freshness always busy encountering gives me no relief. It’s like looking to my dishwasher for a transcendent cleansing that goes beyond making plates bright and squeaky.
Freshness doesn’t have the designed tameness of an appliance, but neither is it coy or remote. It’s insistent on presenting itself as a portal, and resistant to paralysis by the gridlock and suffocation by the pile-on of circumstances. And freshness, always, is our lover.
Today I’d rather have a fixer. From lovers, we get ‘there, there’ consolation, when what we want are solutions, direct and definitive.
Freshness says the world is as full of solutions as of problems, and, yes, it provides the fresh air that clears the smoke and helps us discover them. But, freshness says, solutions are not the point, encounters are. What happens when one makes common cause with the livingness (the readiness to open or be open to what is and can be) of an other addressed as you has lasting intrinsic value that none of today’s solutions which provoke new problems requiring new solutions on and on, don’t.
Whatever befalls tomorrow or thereafter may leave us exultant or appalled, hands lifted or shoulders sagging, but freshness has a smaller, more steady voice: together in the minutes of any encounter, we, you and some other, and I, will parent what is more worth wanting than any solution, or any savior delivering it. You love solutions, says freshness, but I love livingness.
So how deal with the tension of this moment when the prospect of irrevocable harm is a persistent pang, and the urgency to ‘do something, anything’ to prevent or protect translates to muscles primed to fight or flee?
Recognize, acknowledge and address others. Delight in the presence of Friend Freshness. Know that each encounter is the minting of lasting good. Breathe.
Know also that, in ways unpredictable, obscure but mundanely consequential, who we are and how things are in and after encounters is part of the solution.