On heartbreak, love and cognitive dissonance
Three days before the election, I went on a first date.
I go on a lot of first dates. But I was enthusiastic enough for this one that I vacuumed my car, thinking that I might drive her home after dinner.
In the week since that first date, we’ve since spent more time together than we have apart, and I’m not certain I’ll need to go on a first date again.
There was also an election this last week. Perhaps the most significant election of this generation.
The morning after the election, November 6th, my neighborhood in Oakland was unusually quiet. A little like New Year’s day; everyone sleeping off a bad hangover.
My last meeting of the day with a stranger – the sort I often take for Responsive Conference – who turned out to have served as Chief Digital Officer during the Obama administration. She was unofficially tapped for a role in a Harris Administration.
When I asked what she was doing to process the results of the election, she said she’d be spending a week wallowing, but that next week she’d be back to work.
While buying flowers for my new beau, I phoned my mother. She’d attended her regular yoga class, enjoyed the autumnal day, watched the birds, and also spent a day in mourning. But tomorrow, she said, “I get back to work.”
That evening, between cute moments that don’t bear mentioning, I said that while I’d have preferred to be celebrating a different election outcome together, I was nonetheless grateful to be falling in love.
Welcome to Your Silo
Hugh Howey, author of the Silo trilogy, just published a great article about our cultural silos. In it, he shares the story of his loving father who became indoctrinated in a certain type of right wing hatred. I’ve never had a family member succumb to QAnon conspiracies, but my grandfather was a loving man who also loved Rush Limbaugh's vitriol.
My grandfather grew up in the Great Depression and sold vacuums door-to-door. I knew him as a old man who loved his three children, fawned over his grandkids, worked with his hands. He also listened to a lot of AM radio and would talk about “these damn immigrants” over dinner. Even while tipping the Mexican laborers who helped keep up his yard.
There’s a fair bit of cognitive dissonance going around right now. Several of my gay friends are preparing to leave the United States, while other people I know – and know to be good and decent humans – could not be more excited.
Multiple things can be true. We are in a climate crisis. Federal abortion rights have already been overturned, and gay marriage could follow. But that doesn’t mean the “other side” is evil.
There is something discordant about falling in love while grieving for my country. It also requires some mental agility to lovingly remember my grandfather and recall the same man espousing the hate he heard on AM radio.
Whether depressed about the election result or recently in love, whether you are joyful or struggling, the only recourse is to take next action. Celebrate. Grieve. Do what you need to do. And then, when you are ready, get back to work.
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3 things I’ve loved this week
Quote I’m sitting with
"There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly."
-Buckminster Fuller
But that transition isn’t neat or clean or tidy. The caterpillar literally turns into a sack of mush before re-emerging. Change is a messy – and often brutal – process.
You don’t have to have read Hugh Howey’s Silo trilogy to appreciate his non-fiction. Nor do you have to agree with his politics.
His loving father who became indoctrinated in a certain type of right wing hatred, but Hugh reminds us that that doesn’t necessitate vilifying the other side and to track our own silos, too.
I listened to this New York Times bestseller as an audiobook when it first came out, but recently picked up a physical copy and have enjoyed re-visiting it.
Time is precious. And – as far as I can tell – it just goes by faster and faster the older I get! But it helps to embrace our mortality with a dose of humor or even make some to-dos without the intention of completing them.
As Ryan Holiday would remind us, memento mori. Remember that you’re going to die. I also like Oliver Burkeman’s newsletter The Imperfectionist.
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Until next week,
Robin