Optimism In A Time of Apocalypse

republished from @TYOAZINE Vol. 1

I have always identified as a “ruthless optimist.” I cannot help but see the good in people. Actually I don’t believe in the dichotomy of GOOD and BAD. Instead I see an infinite web of experiences that nature (materiality) and fate (spirit) co-create in seamless collaboration. Every day humans participate in and surrender to the circumstances we call fact or fate. Personally I name “that which we have no control over,” THE MYSTERY. It helps me sleep at night. 

So OPTIMIST? In a time defined by the infinite scroll of reasons (data) not to believe in the “goodness” of humanity? Cue years of genocide and mishandled plague, killer storms and orange air, addled aristocrats showboating on the fake news networks, corporate oppression funded by exploiting the poor. I am the generation that arrived at the adulthood party when the ice was melted and the overhead lights were switched back on. High interest tumble weeds and living in dad’s basement were the badlands we inherited from adulthood's false promises. No low-interest mortgages or inflation-appropriate salaries or 2.5 kids and a picket fence for us. We’re living the legacy of forced late blooming. 

Sitting at the crossroads of everything I can’t control about myself–where I was born and to whom, how my parents raised me, the way my brain works, the trauma I survived as a teen, how my gender feels, who I’m attracted to, what I love–I come to rest in the cupped palmful of possibility that IS my agency. What can I control? 

I can control my willingness to be wrong. I can control where I look for love, and to whom I give my trust. I can control my gaze–where am I tuning my attention and when am I willing to be surprised? I can control my own voice to myself–am I gentle, am I kind?  

There is also the element of POETRY. I can choose to organize the information as data, bites of code in a cloud-based-suburban-techno-sprawl. OR I can tell our story, the beauty and the horror, as an epic poem. One we are telling as we live it, now and now and NOW.  

At the starchy-root-source of me, below crackling thoughts and emotional aquifers, I know I am here to love. To inspire and be inspired by the cackling, mundane pack of creature companions I call chosen family. By YOU. In our quotidian beings I feel creation in their infinite beauty. Call me sappy, I can taste it, maple sweet from a thrifted silver spoon. My awe at our capacity to love blooms like snowdrops, the fierce first flowers to force their starry heads through snow, heralding new life as the tastemakers of Spring. These white buds remind me of mountains. Their will to live matched in tectonic action, dirt seeking sky, rocks shoving their way to heaven.  

Perhaps optimism is the wrong word. I do not think everything will always, or even often, be “good.” But I do believe it will be beautiful. I believe love is everywhere if we are brave enough to give and receive it. I believe in life’s impulse to create itself and allow its own destruction. I cannot stop the waves from crashing on the shore. But I can meet them with all of me–the wild-beating-dumbass-glorious force of my truth. And I can hold space for you, wherever you are, however it feels. So perhaps the word is honest. I am here for human honesty, and the beauty it creates.

–Fitch Wilder

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