A Florence + The Machine Song Title

I dreamt I was sitting across from myself, a bit older, conducting an intervention. We very calmly discussed the pains, sorrows, and hurts of our world. I placed a hand on my knee in a palliative gesture and I felt serenity wash over me. The leaves started to fall and the broadcast was cut before I woke up.

Perhaps it is cliche to say that we are in a hurricane season of our lives as humans. We wrought our own decisions, but it also feels unfair because those decisions got made before many of us were born. Many of those decisions still happen when fewer than 1% of us are in the room. Are we complicit if we died fighting the majority? Or more likely, are we complicit because we are more likely born of those who didn’t.

Who is to say we are any different from our fathers who sat upon the same rock contemplating life thousands of years ago? Our ill conceived sense of self is a vastly imperfect window to describe reality, but I suppose there is nothing else to do but try. 

I am talking to a lot of people who have experienced a traumatic event. A student’s leg is broken because a tree fell on his house. A student’s father, a first responder, has died while responding to the hurricane and a tree fell on his truck. Someone had a house fire due to the aftermath of the hurricane. Word of mouth gossip spreads with no abatement about an individual who pulled a gun at a gas station during the first days. My graduate student tells me she was able to deescalate a fight between two people at a gas station using the skills she’s learned.

A theme emerges of almost everyone I meet: “Other people had it worse, Asheville had it worse.” And I find it interesting that anyone who talks about their hardship has a built-in caveat. They are all trying to figure out where to place themselves on the imaginary ladder just in case someone thinks they are weak or whiney. Even I find myself caught in limbo between privilege of individual position, concern for my local community, and broad concern about my family and the people of Lebanon and Palestine. 

A week later a hurricane is headed for Florida and everyone is tense. Will it turn and bring more wind and rain onto broken roofs and softened trees? I dream again of a ladder on its side in the shape of a tree pulled from its roots. As we sit in the dark of our home I think about all of my dreams of Lebanon after I left my last trip. A satire of missing a country with an unstable electrical grid and sitting in my American home with no known timeline of electricity for days or weeks stretches before me. 

Weeks later people want to move on while others still have no power or internet. If a tree falls on a home and no one posts about it to social media, did it make a sound? I think more and more about the constant shrinking and expanding of my perception of community and struggle to formulate my point. 

I am contemplating consciousness, language, comparison, and hierarchy. Frequently research demonstrates that many experiences we consider negative or painful are lessened by shared culture (Lansford, 2010; Ungar, 2013). I am starting to think about what it means when people no longer feel they share culture. A society free of common ritual (e.g., Benga et al., 2015) to process trauma and highly individualized in experience starts to seem like a recipe for natural disaster. 

People continue to try to help one another. We are offered and offer assistance to our neighbors. We support cross-hatched community across town and have hands full of 

resources to share. There is a desire, but also a confusion about what to do.

The phone becomes a black hole of solace. Information and updates are more readily found on social media than anywhere else and the phone is the only way to connect to the outside world with no power (and thus no wi-fi). I can easily subvert the confusion I feel by scrolling the internet. I distract myself with online videos and even when I can read a book I find myself drawn back to that black box. 

That being said, the down time is pretty minimal for us during our 8-day power outage. I go to work which has electricity still and do my work over several days, returning home to no power. We eat meals every night at someone else’s home who does have electricity. We bring supplies to other loved ones, spend time outdoors cleaning up debris, and help frantically clear out a rental house whose lease is up on Oct 1 (And yes, the landlord absolutely did not offer an extension).

It comes and goes and because none of the outside world stops, we cannot either. Letters of recommendation are still due, grants must be wrapped up, and bills must be paid. I once again wonder what it would be like, could be like, to stop for a bit longer. During events like these it is so easy to find the perspective that little of the stuff that seems so scary or urgent in our day-to-day lives actually is. I hear this sentiment echoing across my environments, internet and real, “Why you working so hard? The world is ending…” And while the world as I know it has yet to end anytime it feels that way, I find myself pausing to look at the sky when the urge strikes.

Transitions are always hard and never easy to see the other side of, but humans always surprise me with the way they can sometimes just finally snap and adjust when you start to think it will always be this way. The only constant is change, and as the splendid Octavia Butler wrote:

“All that you touch

You change.

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

God

Is Change.”

It’s hurricane season folks.

Reference

Benga, O., Neagota, B., & Benga, I. (2015). The importance of the rites of passage in assigning semantic structures to autobiographical memory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 38.

Lansford, J. E. (2010). The special problem of cultural differences in effects of corporal punishment. Law and Contemporary Problems, 73(2), 89-106.

Ungar, M. (2013). Resilience, trauma, context, and culture. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 14(3), 255-266.