“Was your year okay?” I find myself asking small-town acquaintances, people I haven’t seen for a year and a half. They share their stories.
Some worked from home; some stayed in the office; others lost jobs. Some are still worried about kids or variants. These conversations remind me that for a period last year, we were all concerned about the same things. Collectively, our attention beamed towards the coronavirus and the election—no matter where we fell on those issues—and now, a few months later, that focus has dispersed.
Last year we stared at one giant neon flashing sign, eyes locked on its rusty hinges and missing lightbulbs, brows furrowed, and now we are looking in a million different directions at once, taking in the moving pieces of our lives.
I don’t recommend it, but if you Google “shared purpose,” you will find no shortage of articles on what that means to businesses. You can learn how to lead through shared goals. You can create shared vision for your company, and explore six steps to rally your team around a common dream. Let me summarize the articles so you can focus on better things: People who teach others how to run successful businesses say shared goals are critical. Important, inspiring, and meaningful.
Experts claim employees want to feel like they can contribute to lasting, important goals—not just check off the same meaningless to-do list every day. I would argue that, in high capitalism, systems of power benefit from having the masses overworked, underpaid, and struck numb by those very to-do lists and shared goals. But I digress.
Last year—in this space, for example—I felt that sense of shared vision. Together as a unit, we wanted to move freely in the world again. We willed public health to improve and longed for pandemic fatigue to relinquish its grip. Though we understood a new President could not repair the essential brokenness of this country, we wanted our election to stop the bleeding.
However depressed we were from pandemic losses big and small, however concerned about loved ones, however overwhelmed by chaos, we were also, to varying and splintered degrees of success, united.
I do not want to romanticize what we’ve lived through, though in certain ways, I do miss the simplicity of last year, the ease in decision-making that came from simply having fewer options—and I will always favor a slower pace. But without glossing over hardship or manufacturing misguided nostalgia, I will say that I also miss our unity of vision. In an increasingly polarized world, that shared desire and experience was a comfort.
In an interview with Krista Tippett this spring, psychologist Christine Runyan mapped 2020 onto Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Those of us privileged enough to spend our lives hovering around the top of the pyramid—thinking primarily about issues of esteem and self-actualization—catapulted straight to the bottom, where we became concerned with physiological needs and safety overnight. Many [white, cis] Americans encountered those themes for the first time.
Even as we gained physiological security and figured out how to feel somewhat safe in the world, we were blocked from the next rung on the pyramid: our fundamental need for love and belonging. The nature of the virus made sharing space—breathing, talking, laughing—our greatest risk, so our need for connection was hijacked by the threat that very connection would introduce.
Still, our weeks together at the bottom of the pyramid created a sense of shared experience that is fertile ground for improved systems of love and belonging going forward. Now that more of us know what it’s like to fear for our safety, I hope we will act with more compassion towards those who question their safety everyday. Now that we know what life with limited access to friendship and intimacy is like, surely we will make space for those things in our new lives.
My ability to find connection through our lack of connection might be what therapists call trauma bonding—who can say for sure—but it is a common response to crisis. I will always feel linked, for example, to people who cared for me after my house fire. I will always be tied to the women with whom I drove up the coast for a funeral in graduate school. I will always adore the friends who made a video for my first pandemic birthday.
These experiences illuminate that our need for connection and being seen in relationship—whether at work, in friendship, or with family—is fundamental to our wellbeing and heightened in times of distress. Shared longing, I now understand, creates threads of connection where otherwise they wouldn’t exist.
Hardship carved a path to unified vision last year, but maybe we could cultivate that feeling without crisis. What if our desire for a safe, sustainable, loving planet grew so strong that it tied us together and directed our every move?
The muscles we collectively strengthened at the bottom of the pyramid last year helped us learn to center humanity and interconnectedness as a path to survival. Even though we didn’t always get it right. Even though we fought amongst ourselves. The year left us with new wisdom and opportunity that we can apply—or ignore—as we see fit.
Listen, these are muscles we are going to have to flex again. Disaster is not coming; disaster is here. We spent the past year training for a future of our own creation. But with heart, fire, courage—and yes, shared vision—I believe we can create the world our children depend on us to make.
Between you and me—
July Fourth is hard to get excited about. I love a pool party as much as the next girl! But we cannot truly celebrate being free knowing that 1) our freedom was built on the enslavement, exploitation, and death of Black and indigenous people, and 2) the modern systems that claim to perpetuate freedom are still killing people. At best, they keep us numb and detached from our power.
For the Fourth, I always enjoy revisiting Frederick Douglass’ “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” NPR’s version, presented on-screen by descendants of Douglass, is particularly poignant. Cookout invitations are inevitable—and welcomed!—but staying grounded in the truth of my neighbors’ experience feels like the least I can do.
Fire season has my mind on the climate crisis again, and I cannot stop thinking about the description of this book: How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire. The author is right; when do say enough is enough? When do we use all powers at our disposal to insist on revolutionary change? Where is the line between non-violence and demanding the world prioritize the planet’s health and our future over power and profit?
I don’t know the answers, but I am asking the questions.
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Take care out there—enjoy the long weekend—dream of freedom for all. I love you.
WE’RE ALL FRIENDS HERE is written by Lauren Maxwell. If you enjoy this newsletter, you can support it by becoming a sponsor, clicking the heart, sharing online, or forwarding to a friend! You can also buy Lauren a coffee. It all helps.