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Learning To Live On Planet Earth
Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it. — Arundhati Roy
I can easily relate to this idea of letting go of excess baggage and traveling light because that’s exactly my story. In the twenty-something years of restoring a ten thousand square foot house in France, we used a third of that space to store stuff that we stopped using and forgot about. Letting go of that stuff was easy. But I realize now we tried to hold onto far too much when we left there. Our pared down life now could never find room for all the…
