November 10, 2021
Best Possible Time
I went away for the weekend—on an airplane. And I KNOW. What decade is this anyway? The experience a necessary one, I figured, when it was offered to me. An opportunity to think and rethink, examining my comfort zone in what has been a time where it’s been all too easy to hunker down inside it.
Something I’ve appreciated all along about living through the last 18 months, or at least tried to appreciate in the moments which such things were also kind of excruciating, is how interesting it’s been to be residing in a time of such abject uncertainty. Even though I really don’t like uncertainty, abject or otherwise, but it really is inherent to the experience of living—it’s just that most of time we have the luxury of pretending otherwise. Imagining our plans and arrangements are somehow in keeping with the order of the universe—and perhaps they are, sometimes, because we’re part of the universe too—but I just know that it’s been good for me to let go (or to begin to let go, or perhaps to ponder the beginning of letting go) of the notion of control. To be asking questions whose answers are far from fixed, if they’re even known.
The line from Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, which I really need to reread again: “It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.”
And of course it’s not the best, but I’ve been doing my best to learn from this time, to resist the way my own instincts are drawn toward certainty, rules, and constraints, even though that’s not really how the world goes. Last fall as families were making the call between in-person schooling and virtual learning, it was fascinating me that while we spend a lot of time posturing about there never being one right choice in regards to parenting, this really was one of those rare circumstances in which this was actually true. To the point where it really didn’t matter much what side you came out on, because nobody was sure of which was the right one, and all of us were just doing the best we could with the information that we had.
I have found it fascinating for there not to really be rules, for safety to be quantifiable. All of using the tools we have at our disposal to mitigate risk, to take those chances which are worthwhile for us to take. 18 months in, we know enough that this is finally getting to the point of being less frightening than genuinely interesting, license for each of us as individuals to think about what’s right for us. To be thoughtful and deliberate in our choices, and they don’t have to be the same as everyone else’s, and that’s really okay.
Because there’s no right answer, which also means there’s no wrong answer, and how often do opportunities come along like that?
