By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
You and I live in a remarkable time in human history, and believe it or not, that’s a good thing. By now it’s finally dawned on us that nothing we’ve experienced lately is quite like anything we’ve experienced before. Each moment opening before us now can be undiscovered territory, but only if we allow ourselves to welcome in new ways of looking at ourselves and our world.
The moment when the current political narrative became too perilous to continue has already come and gone. As we walk the final steps into 2012, our politics have traveled the short distance from surreal to beyond absurd, and the government’s ability to maintain our core democratic principals seems more fragile every day. If you’d asked if such a thing could happen a dozen or so years ago, we would have laughed like loons. But happen it did, and it’s shocking, yes — and now that it’s here, what will we do with it?
On a personal level, the challenges come so frequently now that I doubt that many of us take off our fireman’s hat. We seldom completely relax; there’s always something looming that will require our immediate attention, so we remain prepared at all times. Consciously or not, we exist in a constant state of tension, and whom and what we can trust has become a daily assessment and decision. Perhaps you have developed a tolerance for this condition. Perhaps you aren’t afraid of “fear itself” any more, marshaling your energy for real emergencies rather than wasting your response on smoke and mirrors.
When life goes this deep, we can mine it for treasure. In fact, so much is in flux that we’re finally asking ourselves the painful and important questions that we were too busy for in the past — questions like who are we? What did we do to get in such a gawd-awful fix? And why are we here on the planet, anyway? We’ve accepted institutionalized answers to those questions as our truth for a couple of thousand years. Frankly, haven’t we put off searching for authentic answers to these age-old question long enough?