february: notice
monthly theme: [imagination]
[content warning: mention of death/grief]
What’s come up for you these past 12 months? What about the last 24? Have you felt any shifts in your perspective? Were you able to look at something or someone with new eyes? Maybe you just looked back on your own past decisions with more sympathy and understanding?
The pandemic has been and will continue to be horrifying and disheartening, spreading grief and death through coughing and misinformation. What I’ve been noticing in my studies and work as a Death Doula is that death and destruction can be inherently illuminating and ultimately healing. I know this isn’t an easy or accessible concept to grasp–I spent an entire month writing about how our culture denies us the access to wisdom that death and dying often brings and it’s still hard for me to think about death as anything other than terrifying and sad.
Death, destruction, and loss are often pits of despair in which the only way out is to completely rearrange your understanding of the world, thus allowing your grief to flow and eventually incorporate the reality of loss that you just endured. It is an arduous process and oddly enough, it does require a decent amount of imagination.
The questions I asked to start off this essay must be framed in the longevity of this pandemic and how it has shifted our minds and outer-workings. In the last 2 years, we’ve seen so much adaptation and accessibility be granted at the drop of a hat – we’ve also, unfortunately, seen it all be taken away just as fast. The way we were able to process the news each and every day to make decisions on how best to keep our friends and family safe was an act of imagination– to extrapolate information and make predictions of how we’d feel if we got someone sick or problem solve to keep schedules safely flexible was a triumph of brain plasticity.
Our minds like patterns. The brain is a rhythm-finding-and-making machine, I mean just think about your breath and heartbeat, how those adjust to the circumstances of your experience. Sometimes this search for patterning can lead us to “catastrophize.” My first therapist told me about this concept because my mind often focussed on all of the negative things that happened and were happening, so therefore could often only imagine futures of negativity. My brain and its functioning was stuck in a downward spiral of despair where all I could predict or dream of was tragedy.
This is a maladaptive state to be in. It was very hard for me to get anything done because, “what’s the point, all of this is just going to shit anyway,” was the loudest thought in my head. And it’s an easily accessible thought these days if you’re looking around at the state of the world. Do you do that? Is that phrase part of your internal monolog? That everything is going to shit?
To notice how our imagination is working can be difficult. Actually, it might be safe to say now that it’s the last month, that “noticing” has always been the hardest week for me because our culture and its systems thrive on us being ignorant of our needs, desires, and emotional reactions so that those needs never get met. Ignorance is more profitable than building awareness. And despair is more profitable than hopeful/helpful imagination.
But to look back on these past 1-2 years and notice how our perception of the world, ourselves, and our relationships has evolved can help us to crack open the medicine that imagination brings. I encourage you to read back on old diary entries if you have them or even just memes saved on your phone during February 2021 to see what your internal monolog might’ve been like at this time one to two years ago. Were you policing yourself? Others? Did you judge your emotions as they arose or did you invite them in with safe and healthy curiosity?
Don’t begin (or continue) judging them now. The fear of feeling distressing emotions like shame and judgment is often enough of an excuse to avoid practicing further self-awareness. I’m currently navigating the first few months of a loving relationship that seems to be breaking all of the unhealthy patterns I’ve felt comfortable in the past. This is ultimately good, but the amount of fear I’ve felt has been astounding. I feel it so frequently that the time it takes for me to name the emotions and my fear of them is (relatively) lightning speed (compared to previously). And each time I name everything coming up, it gets easier and easier to realize the fear of the truth behind my emotions is far more daunting than the emotions themselves.
Liz Gilbert says that, “fear is boring.” And what I’m trying to say is that “imagination is (often/can be) the antidote to fear.” Which reminds me of an exercise my therapist taught me–when I begin to catastrophize and fixate on all of the worst possible outcomes, I stop myself and then try to name all of the best (or neutral) scenarios that can happen as well. It’s taken me some effort to get the hang of it, but it’s what’s helped me face these fears of intimacy arising in my personal life. And, of course, this can help us to imagine new futures and possible endings to this pandemic which might currently feel incredibly bleak or even impossible.
This quick practice is part “notice” and part “work,” but will ultimately bring about more awareness of the patterns you see and the predictions you make from them. Surely by now, we’ve learned that our healing process is not always linear and clear-cut, often deviating from the set of philosophical and psychiatric instructions. Noticing our patterns is a consistent part of the process, not just something that happens in between steps 1 and 3.
Can you imagine what it would not only feel, but also look like to give into the wisdom of your own healing? To be so in-tune with your body and your needs that the work, although consistent and difficult, has some sense of ease? Are you getting out of your own way? Maybe for you that means reaching out for help? Or creating self-care rituals that help you to show up for yourself and everyone else?
This entire project has been about opening yourself up to healing modalities and attempting to decipher some common language about the pandemic and how it’s affected generations of people. How do you imagine these pandemic years will affect you as you age? How do you imagine all of these experiences will affect the ways in which we conduct business or organize governments in 50 years? Notice the power of your own imagination and the path that it takes from dreams into every-day decisions.
How has your imagination changed you and how have you changed your imagination? Does it feel expansive or stifling? Can you draw it? Dance the story of it? Write a poem or sing an ode to its wisdom? What helps you notice yourself and your abilities? When and how do you notice your own imagination? What does it make you feel? Is that what you want? If not, how can you alter that internal process? And if so, then how can you share such goodness with the world?
Before March 2020, we couldn’t have possibly imagined the absolute chaos, destruction, and suffering this pandemic would bring about. Two years later, we now have more memories, a different perspective of the world, a deeper understanding, and completely new avenues in which to imagine. The question is now–how do we integrate and understand those experiences so as to build a future that we not only need, but also desire?