Hi. It’s been a while.
I know, right? But I haven’t forgotten you, I promise.
Life happens, and before you know it, seven years have passed. I never imagined I would end up now, almost exactly where I was geographically and professionally 23 years ago. I couldn’t be happier.
Well, I could be -- I think we all can be -- but I have returned to my passion. I let my vanity drag me through ten years of jobs that gorged my ego and starved my soul. The work I did during that time is some of the greatest work I’ve done in my life and I will be proud of it until I die. Nevertheless, it drove me to depths of depression that required every ounce of my energy to conceal - more unsuccessfully than I thought.
I didn’t know it until I recovered.
I have written before about joy. I didn’t realize at the time that I was in the middle of a miserable period of my life. Looking back, what I wrote then remains true - or even more true today. The unceasing deluge of “information” overwhelms our capacity to regulate feeling. It seems we have lost the capacity for anger. Instead we vault from calm to rage.
Last week, Time magazine published a story about the breakdown of civility, “Why Everyone Is So Rude Right Now.” They named all the usual suspects - stress, change, and fear. All of society rarely encounters those three emotional challengers at the same time.
It is all of society.
Two similar times have occurred in American history - the 1890’s and the Great Depression. As today, much of the stress, change, and fear originated in the vast gaps in wealth that had developed in the Gilded Age and Roaring Twenties but proved unsustainable by the Panic of 1893 and the Wall Street collapse in October 1929. The COVID-19 pandemic proved economic warnings about the growing wealth disparity true. The 1890’s gave rise to labor unions and the 1930’s marked the origination of a social safety network that eased such great swings until both fell out of fashion in a generally prosperous society of the 1980’s. Forgetting the lessons of history, we celebrated the accumulation of wealth while ignoring the economically precarious.
This year has seen a different kind of labor action: the great resignation and widespread staffing shortages in low-pay jobs. Rather than organized action, the strikes are being staged by one employee at a time as they find opportunities with better pay and/or working conditions. The lack of civility directed at individuals, people deemed “essential workers” at the onset of the pandemic, hastened the movement. Others cannot return to the workforce due to responsibility for young children or elderly family members for whom there is no longer another source of care.
The Time article cites another factor absent in history - the language dominating the national discussion. Words matter. Our leadership - at every level and on both sides failed their vocabulary test. The attack on any opposing idea as anti-American and the “othering” of anyone in disagreement makes rational discussion nearly impossible. Reason has been removed and replaced with emotion. Facts don’t matter, perception does.
The vitriol spread in media and social media makes finding joy a challenge. Even I, Mr. Joy, question whether it is present in my life.
Thankfully it is.
Joy is playing with my niece.
Joy is cooking something new.
Joy is watching my chickens being chickens.
Joy is grading a paper on which one of my struggling students is successful.
Joy is reading a book that has nothing to do with anything.
Joy is writing again.
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