Loss of Pattern

Here’s a heart-warming image.  Children on my street sitting in lawn chairs with signs and balloons telling their elementary school teachers that they love them and miss them. Nearby, mothers are stringing their children’s art between the trees from yard to yard.At 1pm a line of at least a dozen cars goes by, also with signs, family, dogs and balloons. These are the teachers.

This is just one of the many levels in the changes we are undergoing right now. We miss the people we’re used to seeing, students, teachers, coworkers, and just as important is the structure that bound it together. Each loss reverberates throughout our patterns of daily life. Our routines are the rhythms of home extended beyond the actual residence, a specific loop of familiar imagery, our regular locations and people. Today on Zoom, ubiquitous sign of the times, a student lamented not being on campus, feeling the energy of our creative community as a support.

After the shock and abnormality, adrift without patterns of being, is a challenge to our creativity. 

What I advised my student was to take a big creative leap. Let the unknown open different directions.

It's been said about depression, that the system shuts down when the old ordering system isn’t sufficient for the volume and complexity of new content, the brain uses the space to construct a better system. The world wide calamity has reinforced how connected we are.  The arrogance and anthropocentrism that drove us off a cliff are humbled by the scale of this disaster. It’s an opportunity to build a just structure that considers how our species is integrated with the world gestalt.