We All Go

Throughout the American Civil War, people of privilege were going about their day. Carrying on with building a business, having dinner out, spending afternoons in the park.

150 years later we have hot water on tap, refrigeration, grocery stores, television. Over that period of time, what was once considered luxury became necessity. And people are talking a lot about civil war.

As with Wiley Coyote in the Road Runner cartoon, this newfound comfort and convenience headed us over a cliff many decades ago. But consciousness has a long tail, it’s taken Americans awhile to figure it out (we’re exceptional!) – but as E.O. Wilson famously said, we have Paleolithic emotions, Medieval institutions, and godlike technologies.

Let’s wind the clock back just 100 years to 1922. If I was living in that year at 63 years of age, the effects of the Civil War would have been etched in my mind. More importantly, the valiant yet feeble attempts at Reconstruction would have played a major role in shaping my impressionable adolescent brain. Just as electricity would be reshaping the factory floor, the circuits in my brain would be wired and rewired by Civil War, social upheaval, world war, the automobile, a worldwide pandemic and so much more by 1922.

As with today, conflict was everywhere. Within countries, between countries, within communities, between race and class and between “progress” and nature… including our human nature.

As a species, we crave belonging and solidarity. “Me, too” has always been a powerful phrase. Only to be surpassed by, “I love you.”

So why all the conflict?

Let’s imagine that the war isn’t really a war at all, but a need to reconcile something that begins within each of us.

No one knows where consciousness comes from. The things we say and do either come from a memorized and adopted story or, when imagination and creativity are engaged, from “out of nowhere.”

On the other hand, our bodies are made of physical matter that can be traced through strands that carry the embodiment of past lives. Every cell holds information of one kind or another. What to be (a liver… a heart…) and memory of past experiences through “predispositions” and epigenetics.

Consciousness is born from a seemingly infinite source. Shaped from birth into a form that needs to function in whatever environment it finds itself in to survive. Those environments, in turn, are shaped by the stories parents, relations, caregivers, religious and political leaders – and more recently, the economy as abstract actor – believe or are commanded to obey.

Humans are born from their mother’s womb. Carrying the memories through blood and bone of thousands of people before her.

We are a living memory trying to reconcile with a storied past. Past lives shape our body, past stories shape our mind. The two had never met until we were born.

As our current stories become incapable of matching the moment at hand through the slow, steady increase in comfort and convenience for some – many millions – to the egregious detriment of others – billions -, our species is reaching a rupture between what we’ve been for millennia and what we’ve become over a few centuries. For the first time in our species’ history, we are reaching a breaking point between what our bodies know and our mind is creating.

What if the civil war is internal and eternal? What if being a human on this earth means reconciling the entanglement of spirit and matter? The god-like consciousness of a newborn and the memories they carry in their body – impressed upon and molded from birth by stories the culture created and their parents believed.

No one will win this war. It’s what it means to be human. A ceasefire is necessary – through kindness, compassion, gratitude and forgiveness. Listening and witnessing. Acknowledging that no one can make sense of this moment. No one (if someone says they can, they are selling you something).

But we are in it together. Not only do we have to put our weapons down, but our shields, too.

Nobody wins this time. We all go.