These are tough times, to say the least.

We face the most widespread and extensive global health emergency in at least 100 years. Our economy reels like a delirious boxer. Opinions have become “facts.” Social unrest is boiling over. The political “speech” (as it is), focused on the elimination or retention of possibly the most controversial, divisive and polarizing administration in memory; has become that of a pair of three-year-olds yelling “You’re a poop!” “No, your face is!” It feels like we are together, untethered in an old rusty school bus from the 1950s; without seat belts, hurtling down a bumpy mountain road, out of control, clinging to life as we screamed in terror for someone to save us as we plunged off a cliff on November 3. ; assuming that eventually everything will be fine. Yet that screeching inner voice refusing to shut up, saying, “Don’t get your hopes up,” keeps rising. I just want everything to stop.

But wait, there is more!

Ghia, Mother Earth, is facing an existential crisis, resulting in endless firestorms, incessant floods, dry drafts, and in general an exceptionally harsh climate, which is devastating property and lives (including non-human ones) at an unprecedented global level. (For the record, I long to live in a world where the word “unprecedented” is no longer a standard adjective.)

The catalog of events of aiming, squeezing the chest and producing anxiety has us in the hairpin triggers, damaging our collective and emotional physical and mental health. For those of us who can remember, 1968 is a Disney fairy tale compared to the Stephen King horror story of 2020. No one, not a single person alive today, has ever experienced upheaval like this. None of us.

Of course, I don’t need to tell you that. You see it. You feel it. You are living it, just like me. As the curse says, we live in “fascinating” times.

It is a challenge to keep hope high when even the sky is covered in a thick layer of burnt smoke.

However, a flicker crossed my mind.

In the field of behavior change, the trigger that causes change is known to be a combination of fear, strength, and pain. After all, no one wakes up one morning, examines their lifestyle, decides that everything is idyllic, and proclaims, “God, I love my life! Let me see how I can change it.” No, change only becomes known once we are exhausted, scared, scarred, abused, and overwhelmed. It’s called “rock bottom”, that gut-churning feeling that something, anything, is better than where we are, so despite the pain or uncertainty that awaits us, reluctantly, reluctantly, in a subdued way, we walk cautiously into the new. If done smoothly and repeatedly, change evolves.

As individuals, as a society, as an inextricably linked global community as one, that’s where we are now: hitting rock bottom.

Therefore, I am trying, I will weakly admit, to see these days not as the end of time, but as the momentum that makes us question everything and hopefully take the energy from the turbulence that churns around us as the catalyst to move forward bit by bit. in the direction of what future historians will call the “New Awakening.” From this pain, I envision a world for our great-grandchildren and beyond, that is more compassionate, gentle, kind, supportive, cooperative, and in balance with the planet.

I’m not sure that you and I live there; it will take generations to complete the arc. But we have to believe, pray, affirm, and act like it’s going to happen. The alternative is unthinkable.

We must not let go of hope. We must remember that we are all in this together.