Youthful Life: X

"Love is like infinity: You can't have more or less infinity, and you can't compare two things to see if they're 'equally infinite.' Infinity just is, and that's the way I think love is, too."   Fred Rogers Kenopsia - n.  - the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that’s usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet—a school hallway in the evening, an unlit office on a weekend, vacant fairgrounds—an emotional afterimage that makes it seem not just empty but hyper-empty, with a total population in the negative, who are so conspicuously absent they glow like neon signs. (Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows). This is a weird time . I feel like there's competing feelings raging inside me. I think it's worthwhile for me to share what I've been contemplating. I'm back in remote classes for the remainder of my semester of school. It's been an adventure to say the least, but in some ways I am grateful to have acce...

"Our society is much more interested in information than wonder, in noise rather than silence...And I feel that we need a lot more wonder and a lot more silence in our lives" Fred Rogers What a time to be alive. Those words have been truer than in this current sociopolitical moment. Feels like we're on two juxtaposed timelines. One where folx are continuing to go about their lives as if nothing has changed, and another that is nearly eschatological and dystopian. Everything is normal and simultaneously it's not. What the actual hell is going on? How we both know but also not really know. Maybe it's because the threat that we're facing as a collective populous is not quite visible in the ways that we traditionally consider dangerous. In fact, it's microscopic, subtle, and obscure. It's at once nowhere to be seen and absolutely everywhere. How do we escape the thing that's all around us and beyond our control. Control. There's that word...

" Little by little we human beings are confronted with situations that give us more and more clues that we are not perfect. " Fred Rogers Some days we're overwhelmed, while others we are underwhelmed. When are we just well ... whelmed? I think of how often I hear from others that they are overwhelmed, and that feeling leads them to paralysis. It's that moment of having too much, excess, or more than we can bear that scares us into submission. We shut down. We break down. We stop moving. The irony is what we really need to is to keep moving but do so strategically, in ways that give us back control. We just need to do or handle one thing, and one thing only before moving on to the next thing. I think about what happens when my laundry piles up. I've done one load and need to fold it, but then here comes another, and another, and suddenly I have a mountain of clean clothes that seems so insurmountable that I cannot even begin to imagine tackling it. So I do...