Watching, from a distance, the bravery of people fighting for the freedom of their country and knowing the odds are stacked against them, I wonder about the relevance of encounters and freshness to them in their situation.
Anything that I’ve written here at worthwanting.com has to count in instances like this, if it is to count at all.
Freedom fighters, or any strivers, hope for success in particular forays, and may be excited by the prospects of victory. At the same time, fear informs them about imminent risks, and causes them to dread ultimate failure. So is it always with us in this mundane life: we’re balanced on a fulcrum, a knife edge however sharp or dull, such that, envisioning splendid or disastrous outcomes, we exult or despair based on calculation of the odds.
Our mundane needs are simple: comfort, dignity and safety, which we satisfy by accomplishing tasks of achievement, performance, maintenance. Often we adopt enabling agendas of profit, power or perpetuation (or permanence of presence) so as to ensure and enhance the positive outcomes we seek.
Sometimes we are thrilled at the prospect these agendas promise: how much weight they add our side of the seesaw and how extremely improbable it is (not to mention unjust) that anything cause the seesaw to rotation toward the equal-odds horizontal, much less beyond.
But, of course, all outcomes in the mundane world are a product of innumerable interactions and multiple motivations. Even if the degrees of freedom in the operations of the world are small, changes can accumulate quickly and be amplified exponentially, making the future not just risky but uncertain. Slowly or suddenly, seesaws do swing.
Being thrilled by the prospect of freshness, however, is a different thing than envisioning enticing outcomes that radiate with glorious satisfaction. Freshness comes to us like an old good friend (indeed freshness has been friend to all of us many times already) in every encounter we initiate or accept. Freshness does not judge us by our success or failure, our approbation or humiliation, our robustness or fragility. Freshness, always loyal (but never exclusive or complicit), is interested only in making common cause with our livingness, and, so doing, bringing into being new, good things of lasting value.
Even when circumstances seem hopeless, and all lines seem to converge on disaster and death, freshness is always till companioning us, still gifting us, still introducing us to others and othernesses, and always looking beyond the finish line. There’s always time and occasion for freshness. Freshness always has time for us.
Thrilling at that the prospect of freshness is founded on a perspective of reality that gives full respect to the mundane, its trials and triumphs, its zero-sum set up, its scarcity dynamics, and its closed future, but also sees it embedded in and permeable to a larger transcendent different in almost every way: creative, abundant and open-ended.
So, back to the top, freedom fighters, whose courage I applaud. What I would wish them, and all of us, in addition to the means by which to resist threat, deception, and violence, individual and systemic, is that larger perspective, at every moment possible, that readiness to receive freshness–for freshness will surely come.