This is the first year on recall to be experiencing autumnal resistance. The harvest seasons of deepening colours past, crisp breezes free from summer’s bug swat punctuations could have never lasted long enough. But this year I find my cheek turning away from the inevitable change of seasons in the northern hemisphere, while ruminating on whether or not people change.
The futility of writing on a subject as inevitable as change mirrors the ongoing conversations in my life off-screen. Existing within social media and real life, viewers are presented with real challenges in discerning the value of screen based opinions.
Four years might as well read for years, because the subject of change has little regard for time. A week or a decade are allegedly known quantities to frame time with, but do little to convince me time past is enough proof to truly know whether or not change is possible. How someone is usually has more to do with the internal terrain and less with how one may appear. In a screen-based culture, when what appears begins to supplant what is, the media of story telling begins to replace what is. This ideal-reality conflict floats successfully between virtual and actual reality. Change then is not merely the passing of seasons, but an unfolding and coming to terms with the actual expressions of life as they are, not as they are imagined.
Could it be that Change is an impoverished choice of word? The sense of change amounts to a mode of transition in a method of learning. Change occurs not with more information, but with more understanding. I often wonder how much assuredness people seem to exhibit is what gives them the permission to assume knowing what is best for another. While I cannot seem to be able to tell myself, scarcely anyone else what conclusion should be drawn, maybe this points towards my own ineptness? or reticence to jump on the bandwagon. Therefore as I pull on the reigns of the inevitable changes of season, I send out this letter as a signal, an invitation to draw back the curtains, put a pause on beliefs, and supplant a bit of doubt to slow down the galloping horses of sureness.
Who exactly is coming along with you, within you? How many times have you accepted something that did not sit right with you? or did not speak up because those who question common belief with discerning inquisition incite violence? In the rise of cultural war, the choice to hate is one that can easily sweep up anyone and land them in a field of justified acceptance in group. The choice to remain still and within a space of love in such a conflicted time requires additional courage and bravery.
Since we are responsible not for what others do, but for what we do, then those actions reflect on the internal partnership within each individual. Within each person are who they are, which sometimes gets dollied up with who they think they are, or fogged up by a bank of opinions. And since people live in relationship with each other, who they think they are is not always who they really are.
These kinds of questions may incite momentary pause but this kind of pause may require a few trips around the sun to acquiesce to. The truth of what you are and what you are doing is more of an acquired tasted than a saccharine rush. Can you be alone, free from feeling lonely? Can you withhold head nodding long enough to not only listen? but hear what someone is saying?
There’s this hard to argue saying I had found myself nodding along to for awhile: Nothing new under the sun. This phrase offered a taste of certitude, an assurance to lean into during my discomfort with ambiguity. The phrase throws a broad stroke over an expansive horizon of nourishing detail and discernment. The magnitude of never ending newness often generating itself from loss made the practice of forming platitudes such as Nothing new under the sun made lending the dark corners of my mind to tidy falsehoods less alluring.
Another saying: love eventually wins, thorn scratched body and all, tastes a bit like another phrase about beauty having a longer incubation period. In what appears to some as choice paralysis, looks to others as dogma, and to others as ritualistic tribalism. These views of people and life are cognitive acrobatics made up of discomfort with ambiguity.
Within this menagerie of words is the invitation to allow yourself be, for a moment today or throughout these transitional weeks, a more slowly moving creature through a field of the unknown. By embracing resistance or acceptance and the myriad of felt experiences with curiosity, that field of unknowns offers all the richness that running through or leaping to conclusions kept you from. And no one can tug on those strings within you, without your permission. You are the chooser of who comes along within and with you. At the end of the day we remain not with who we like in the mirror or not, but with knowing our hands and what connect to the heart.
Piano melody composed during Autumn 2017 by Rachel Wolfe for an exhibition in Oslo, Norway.
Who came with you