I don't really write on this blog much, even though as those who know me can attest, I'm not short of things to say. I think it's because I'm a (grudgingly recovering, oft-relapsing) perfectionist and if I can't write something structured and world changing and great that can quite happily be published in my collected essays edition in 2050 without major editing, then I can't do anything at all! Things like that always sound ridiculous when you articulate them, but brains are ridiculous, that's exactly the sort of thought process they get off on (mine, anyway).
Anyway, new policy: short, semi-unintelligible snippet posts with hardly any structure and a total failure to cohere or tell a nicely shapely narrative. Instead of a blog, it will be a beautifully shapeless blob! Or that's my strategy anyway.
So, this blob: something I always want to write about but never feel well enough researched/informed/able to articulate: the difference between acceptance and apathy. This distinction is pretty important to my own life but what makes me want to try and explore it is how often poor old 'acceptance' seems misunderstood.
I remember walking along one day with a friend who was experiminting with illicit buddhism, and I was trying to force him to admit that it was stupid and passive because all the adherents would just meditate away while meanwhile the world would pave paradise and put up a shopping mall. "Everything will be concrete and you won't even CARE!" was the gist of my complaint. He had no good answers and resorted to the wise yet condescending nod technique. This is what I would say to myself if I could timetravel back there and be him:
Me: the problem with 'accepting' is that you won't even care about (for eg) climate change. It sounds like you just want us to sit back and watch the fallout, fuck all the suffering and the victims etc.
Me-time-travelling-inhabiting-my-friend's-body-and-talking-to-myself: nah acceptance is not apathy. To me, acceptance doesn't mean all the things that haven't happened yet - how can you accept them when you don't even know what they'll be? It just means what has already happened and what is happening right now. I wonder if our future obsessed culture creates this determination to think 'accepting' means 'accepting what might happen'.
Me: but change and action come from dissatisfaction with the status quo and it being unfair and stuff
TimetravelMe: I don't reckon 'acceptance' means no motivation. It's not the same as resignation. I can be critical of something but still accept it - it just means I'm not trying to block reality because I can't handle it. If I am angry and hurt about lots of elephants dying or people hurting one another, acceptance doesn't mean I go 'oh well, too hard'. It just means I acknowledge my own reactions. It's the opposite of putting my fingers in my ears and going lalala because it's too much and too scary. So to me that would pave the way for quality action, because I wouldn't be tied to blind reaction.
I guess it does sound weird to say "I accept deep sea oil" - maybe the language is too polluted - but what I mean is that I accept that it is happening right now, I feel concern and grief and anger that people care about money more than this world our home, but I currently feel moved to do everything in my power to stop it. Acceptance to me just means owning my responses and acknowledging that I have no idea how it will all turn out, and feeling my own fear about what might happen. I want to act, effectively, full of life and curiosity, not full of tense determination to make things be 'my way'. I refuse to act from a place of domination - I don't think I can dominate my way into a better world.
And apathy - to me it's a contradictory word because it conjures up both intense stasis, and extreme tense movement. Sort of like when you're lying in bed and you don't want to get up but you really need to and it is anything but relaxing. I totally disagree that apathy is laziness. Apathy is being afraid, losing faith that anyone will listen to you, feeling disempowered, shame, hating yourself, blocking the world or your emotions because they're too much... all of which are bloody exhausting! Apathy is incredibly tiring! It's like being a golf ball all full of stretched rubber bands all the time, working hard to keep a chaotic world under control. Apathy doesn't need abuse, apathy needs agency. To me a core part of apathy is being unable to feel or own your own response to things -perhaps shutting down as a response to overwhelmingness. So you hear the sea level is going to rise? That polar bears are going extinct? A million pieces of tragedy every day? If I can't acknowledge my own reaction to hearing this stuff, feel it in my body, – if that feels like too much, overwhelming– then I have to block it out. Like I do with my library fines ($68.30 last time someone managed to prise my fingers out of ears and shout the amount in).
So we throw more depressing statistics at the apathetic, hoping they'll 'wake up'. Maybe one or two people do, overflowing with grief and anger. My theory is that it doesn't work - because any action is blocked by it being too scary to accept what is going on and our own response to that. Apparently conservative people are more fearful, which in my biased world sounds like a similar response (no I refuse to do referencing – you'll just have to take my word for it). So for me the question becomes - how can I help make it feel more safe to accept the world/ourselves/reality? How can I do that more and more myself? Not apathetically, not resignedly, not passive or with withdrawal – but being ok with what I am and what's going on in me, all the time. And then acting in a fresh way, full of all the energy I'm not wasting filtering myself and the world.
Me: zzzzz
ps I lied I didn't actually conquer perfectionism I just got sick and stuck in bed. All incomprehensibles may be blamed on the fever.
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