Finding freedom: what 33°C does to a pre-birthday brain
The poet Atticus wrote: may he arrive at his death late, in love, and a little bit drunk.
I arrive at my 50th late, sweating like a cart horse, and once again having lost my keys.
I nearly don’t make it at all.
These are the opening lines to a piece of writing that started in 2022 — I cringe to call it memoir, but that’s the simplest way to describe the scatter-gun assembly of life anecdotes and mayday-type reflections — after a bad patch of climate-induced blues landed me in the loonie bin.
I can use that term, I have the pink exit slip to prove it.
[To be clear, it’s not a bin, or for loonies. I came to think of this hospital stay as a much-needed spa treatment for a broken brain.]
Cause: complex grief, the doctors call it.
I’d lost my partner to emigration, my income to the tech-bros in Silicon Valley, and my home and retirement savings to the cost of living crisis. Mostly, I’d lost meaning: the battle to slow climate collapse appeared to be lost.
In spite of writing about this issue for two decades, I was still caught in a fog of naivety and denial about how serious things were. This coma ended in the way that an asteroid ends an epoch.
Boom: I realised that more than half of the emissions driving climate collapse had been poured into the atmosphere in the 50 years I’d been alive.
Boom: in spite of 20 years of trying to be part of the solution, things were so much worse, and careening into a state of much-more-worse.
Boom: now the scientific community was telling us that we had ten years to level off carbon emissions if we hoped to slow the collapse.
That’s one decade, ten birthdays, 130 full moons.
That was in 2019. Now we’re down to fewer than five birthdays; fewer than 65 full moons.
Story Ark’s alfresco office in the Magaliesberg.
Meaning-making and action
Story Ark: tales from southern Africa’s climate tipping points is one of the remedies to treat the fever of daily blues and the longer-term chronic malaise of existential weariness. It’s how I’m finding agency, if not hope, in an increasingly chaotic world.
Since that hospital stay I’ve drawn up a kind of manifesto. It’s something to switch on like a porch light on the darkest days. Others working in this area have their own go-to reminders so they can keep on keeping on.
These are mine.
We’re meaning-making animals. When we find meaning in suffering, we’re more emotionally resilient. Quoting the bad-ass psychiatrist #ViktorFrankl, who came away from the horror of the Nazi death camps having noted that those who were able to survive had somehow found meaning, somewhere, which he writes about in his tectonic book Man’s Search For Meaning.
If we can’t find meaning in the suffering, though, we have two options: top ourselves (a waste of good talent, though?); or embrace the absurdity of it all, and put ourselves in service of others. This is the wisdom of existential philosopher #AlbertCamus in his prescient novel #ThePlague.
We can find freedom in this. Philosopher and cultural theorist #SlavojŽižek reckons we’re healed as individuals when we stop navel-gazing and put ourselves towards a greater cause: a fight for family/love/art/meaning/social justice. That, he says, is true liberation.
In which case, there’s one simple injunction from the uber-poet #MaryOliver who asks: what are we going to do with our one wild and precious life?
All of this builds, of course, on the foundational wisdom of what’s-his-name… that #Buddha chap, who said, basically: “be kind, don’t be kak”.
But if all of that fails, we can draw on the existential gold reached by the late #DouglasAdams, whose philosophical number crunching determined that the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is… 42.
Dear readers and Story Ark followers, I write this to you on the final morning of 53-orbits-of-the-sun — yes, I made it this far — from beneath the canopy of a red milkwood in the Magaliesberg that is older than industrialisation and the commodification of all its inputs and outputs. While writing about extreme heat as the campsite broils through blisteringly hot days where max temperatures have been between 30°C and 33°C for a fortnight, and may top out at 36°C in the coming days.
May we find meaning.
May we find a cause that is bigger than ourselves so that we can find freedom. Freedom from the Capitalist treadmill, the isolating individualism of our modern culture, the othering of our more-than-human kin in the natural world, and freedom from the groundlessness that comes with feeling like the world is unravelling.