There is tension in everything.
This is the grounding the theory I have currently. If there is a way the world works, I would say it has something to do with tension.
Tension in the sense that most of our experiences, consumables, and relationships are connected to each other thing and they’re in constant push and pull with one another.
Tensegrity is an excellent model. Kenneth Snelson and Buckminster Fuller’s work. Structures can work together with rods (our institutions) held together with cables/strings (the way institutions relate to each other) so that the whole system leans and pushes and pulls as weight is shifted around.
In marriage and parenthood, maybe there’s a hard day and one partner is taking on more tension when the other partner can’t. The marriage or household doesn’t collapse or break because 50% of it isn’t able that day.
The world – gosh, what a tired phrase! – is very much a series of rods attached by cables, re: Strait of Hormuz/Iran War/Energy crisis.
We have lots of tension on the cables connecting the rods right now, seems to me.
One begins to wonder if the cables (individual events) can put much more weight on the rods (institutions) and maintain tensegrity (tensional integrity).
One also tries to remember that one is not the first to wonder this, nor the first to experience “Something”. One has already and always seen what looks like too much tension on the cables and their rods (see, Ecclesiastes “nothing new under the sun”).
Yet it feels like Something is happening. Or, worse yet “something”. Not a local event to this time in history, but a bang set to go off and echo in the years to come.
And I cannot help but feel that if something is happening then, well, it is time to get serious, get to work, and get sober.
What do I mean by get serious?
I mean, though I have no experience here, serious times call for serious ways of living. We were young (and still are) during the COVID-19 pandemic and that required a very serious change to our way of life. It could have been a lot more serious still. We could have lost a job, a house, etc.
I.e.: things may no longer be business as usual.
In fact, the status quo has been blown up. For better or for worse, we all want a different status quo – not no status quo – but which different status quo we get to will probably take a lot of grasping and some likely hard times.
What do I know, but any serious person I’ve read in the last month since the start of the war in Iran, and especially in the last 3 days, says that we’re somewhere in the late January to early February COVID time frame, where there is an uneven experience playing out for what is coming and though it’s not happening to you right now, it is happening to your brother and sister in Thailand or Bangledesh and you have no reason to assume that it will not soon visit you.
What do I mean by get to work?
When there is no status quo, the choice to “do nothing” and ride the wave really don’t exist. There is, from what I imagine, either doing or not doing.
Not doing probably should seem more like “not participating” rather than inaction.
Doing can become much clearer because optionality is weakened and the cost of doing the wrong things is much higher. I.e., waste is a higher tax.
So, if something is happening it is time to start doing.
It’s hard to anticipate what exactly is to be done but it will probably look like:
- less leisure
- less planning for the future
- more taking care of day to day needs
- planting a garden
- staying in good physical condition
- working a bit closer to the sound and feel of the earth, less pure pleasure
I don’t mean to sound dramatic. Having leisure at all, or not keeping a garden but buying whatever you want from the supermarket and having it delivered to your front door, is already a privilege of living in a country where true needs are taken care of if you just have the right job and know the right people.
Much of the world is living in a “get-to-work” type way.
The difference in how the median citizen in Guatemala bathes themselves vs. how I bathe myself takes much more work, or is just much less convenient or pleasurable, than it takes or is for me.
So, in a future (that seems to be starting right now) where there is less energy to consume, those of us in The Middle downstream of those effects will have a life that’s a bit harder that we otherwise were expecting.
If you could know the experience of a New York City shoe repair shop owner in 1925 vs. their experience in 1930 (post-Depression onset), they will have lost ground in how much they could expect life to just generally keep getting better. And 6 years of the world’s life is felt much differently, or doesn’t feel like as big of a loss or as big of a deal, as those 6 years as experienced by the New York City shoe repair shop owner.
In this way, I think of Sadie’s dad (your grandfather) and the sacrifice he had to make during the 2008 financial recession in the U.S. when he lost his job in construction, and there weren’t many new jobs to be had, so he had to move away from the family in Oregon for a whole year! back to San Francisco with his parents to find work while saving money and applying for jobs back in Oregon.
I can hardly imagine! This is what it looks like to both get serious, and get to work.
I pray we won’t be experiencing this sort of thing, but that would be a miracle in the context of “how the world works.”
What do I mean by get sober?
I roughly mean that it’s time to trim the fat of consumption, especially over consumption, and be bright and aware of the situation.
Being both physically sober and spiritually and emotionally attune to God’s way in the world will be more important in times where tensegrity is breaking down.
If something is happening, it’s time to stop going out for beers with friends to discuss “the game” and time to start going on walks the discuss “the work.”
Saving money and freeing up brain space will both be quite important if something is happening.
Being in good physical shape, reading more, and having a sense about what is going on – sharper to understand – becomes much more valuable than the experiences of leisure and decadence.
If something is happening, and one chooses to get sober, there is more Folgers coffee and less oat milk lattes in one’s future.
You might think of Thoreau writing on why he went to live in the words when you think of “getting sober”:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary.
I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life,
to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms,
and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world;
or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
“…to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms”
That is worth having at the front of the mind when one chooses to get sober in the face of something happening.
One other thing about assessing what to do if something is happening, related to Pascal’s Wager:
If you believe and God exists → infinite gain (eternal life) If you believe and God doesn’t exist → small loss (some time, effort, restraint) If you don’t believe and God exists → infinite loss If you don’t believe and God doesn’t exist → small gain
– a ChatGPT summary of the theory
Replace God existing with “something happening” and this is a framework I’m using to think about all this.
The step I now need to take is doing something about the framework instead of only thinking about it.
If something is happening, we’ll be okay.
And together we’ll have to get serious, get to work, and get to sober, while walking in daily prayer with God, to make it so.