A Crisis of Epic Proportions
Did you know that Traditional Chinese Medicine posits that a full life cycle is 60 years? And that after 60, a person starts a new life cycle? Reborn, all-new, and, I joked when I turned 60, a chance to be both new and improved, much like laundry detergent consistently alleges.
Three years have passed since 60 and I find myself occupied with much larger, more existential questions than I was before the big six-oh. I don’t really know why but it’s been useful to think I am truly able and allowed to start over. In those years, a lot of formerly clouded matters have clarified themselves for me, things like boundaries, what I say no to, and what I welcome.
The question that has most occupied me is, “If I could give but one gift to humanity, and only one, mind you, what would it be? Stated another way, what do I think the world needs (most) now? I have sorted through and rejected a good many answers, you can imagine. When I finally hit on the truest answer for me, I had to laugh as I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Not kidding.
I did not default to Jackie DeShannon’s/Dionne Warwick’s standard musical answer: love, sweet love. There’s plenty of love, although, arguably, there may be a slight problem with distribution. My long-stated mission in life is inner peace, but I didn’t land there either, much to my own surprise. That seemed like a no-brainer.
What does the world need now? [I’d like a trumpet shout-out here, like the one a royal herald receives, if you please, when they make the movie.]
What the world needs now, more than absolutely anything else, is … imagination. I would submit to you, in fact, that the world is in a perilous crisis of imagination—more than any other thing.
Columnist Thomas B. Edsall’s essay in The New York Times this morning is called, “The Resentment That Never Sleeps,” and is subtitled, “Rising anxiety over declining social status tells us a lot about how we got here and where we’re going.”
Status? Really? Social status is causing anxiety? He writes, “Roughly speaking, Trump and the Republican Party have fought to enhance the status of white Christians and white people without college degrees: the white working and middle class. Biden and the Democrats have fought to elevate the standing of previously marginalized groups: women, minorities, the L.G.B.T.Q. community and others.
“The ferocity of this politicized status competition can be seen in the anger of white non-college voters over their disparagement by liberal elites, the attempt to flip traditional hierarchies and the emergence of identity politics on both sides of the chasm.”
I’d call that a crisis of imagination. Anu Garg’s Word-A-Day quoted poet John Milton (9 December 1608-1674), this morning, “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” What makes the difference is how we tell the story. Here are some that need revision …
There’s a worldwide pandemic. Just look at the solid rust tract of The Times’ daily front-page map. The U.S. is wobbling in the face of exponential virus-spreading and hospitals that cannot meet the demand for beds.
The economy is listing sadly, once again, toward the 1% of the wealthiest and the corporations that the law has deemed are “people too.” The 99% are drowning. A last-ditch, pathetically diminutive relief package is, like my husband this morning who moved a few too many heavy boxes yesterday and is now struggling to rein in his ordinary expansive physicality, struggling to stand firm in the face of Washington insider posturing and politicking.
Eviction and foreclosure moratoria are set to expire at the dawn of 2021.
The White House is boasting about Operation Warp Speed and its faster-than-anyone-ever-in-the history-of-the-world creations. There is little agreement on a plan for manufacture or distribution.
President-Elect Biden is countering the vaccination lollipops and unicorns from The White House with an attempt to “leaven his grim message with hope, promising to channel hardship into commitment for action. ‘Out of our collective pain,’ he said, ‘we’re going to find collective purpose, to control the pandemic, to save lives and to heal as a nation.’”
At the same time, “Jocelyn Benson, the secretary of state in Michigan, said she had just finished putting up Christmas decorations with her 4-year-old son when she heard dozens of Trump supporters shouting outside her home. … ‘This challenging, divisive moment that we find ourselves in, the only way to get out of it is for elected officials on both sides of the aisle to condemn what’s happening.’”
And we’re all in a flutter about social status? This is why I maintain there is a crisis of imagination that has taken on epic proportions. We cannot find another story to tell because we are failing at imagining a new one, Beloved.
Enter former President Barack Obama, and his new memoir A Promised Land. Book Review editor Michiko Kakutani spoke with Mr. Obama. She writes of his book, “It attests to Mr. Obama’s own storytelling powers and to his belief that, in these divided times, ‘storytelling and literature are more important than ever,’ adding that ‘we need to explain to each other who we are and where we’re going.’”
Mr. Obama takes my own position, certain that “the role that storytelling can play as a tool of radical empathy to remind people of what they have in common—the shared dreams, frustrations and losses of daily life that exist beneath the political divisions,” is the very basis for telling stories.
“Mr. Obama mov[es] freely between the personal and the political, the anecdotal and the philosophical. Whether he’s talking about literature, recent political events or policies implemented by his administration, his observations, like his prose, are animated by an ability to connect social, cultural and historical dots, and a gift—honed during his years as a community organizer and professor of constitutional law—for lending complex ideas immediacy and context.”
This is why we must ask ourselves what we, first individually, most need—and listen for a new and improved story, Beloved, and then, with the courage of our convictions, begin to tell that new and improved story to everyone we encounter.
Then we must ask ourselves what our world most needs—and listen to that new and improved story, Beloved, and then, with the courage of our convictions, begin to tell that new and improved story to everyone we encounter.
Perhaps that’s why my imagination wasn’t the least bit surprised this morning when The Times’ Quotation of the Day was titled, “What’s in a Name? A Patient Adds Shakespearean Flair.”
“It could make a difference to our lives from now on, couldn’t it?” Thus spake one “WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, an improbably named 81-year-old from Warwickshire, England, who became one of the first people on earth to get a clinically authorized, fully tested Covid-19 vaccine on Tuesday.”
I cannot believe it a coincidence that one the greatest imaginations of our collective history was one of the first to be vaccinated. I’m taking it as a vote for my newest gift to the world—Imagination. Et tu?
Dr. Susan Corso is a spiritual teacher, the founder of iAmpersand, and the author of The Mex Mysteries, the Boots & Boas Books, and spiritual nonfiction. Her website is susancorso.com.