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With Crisis Comes Clarity
What matters more, what should matter less, and what we spend our time, attention, money and bandwidth on changes.
With crisis comes clarity. The comfort of being at ease has the downsides of dulling the senses, slowing the reflexing, softening the mind. The absence of crisis, or the crisis being far enough away to be impersonal and of no immediate threat, is pleasing to the point of addiction. Of a high to be chased, a need to be met, an altered reality that must be maintained at all costs. Of using technology not as a funnel of information from a big, big world but as an umbrella to keep anything unpleasant from falling on your head like some unwelcomed existential rainstorm. The immense privilege of technology to manifest not only the full depth and breadth of human knowledge and live streaming of world events in real time, but also to filter and provide an off switch when that wider world becomes too much.
With crisis comes clarity. The folks to whom pillow shams not matching the curtains brings forth a violent rage of social media postings and demand for restitution from the universe for the wrong done upon them might — just might — have a story, or image, or video, or anecdote they heard tell of folks who have lost everything burn through their inane existence for a moment. Lost everything…
