One spiritual practice I highly recommend is journaling. Keep a journal or a diary – some written record of your life. How frequently you write and in much detail is up to you. I may write a paragraph every day for a week, then nothing for three weeks, then a page and a half. I don’t record my routine activities (though some people do) but if something is important, I write it down.
There are two main benefits to journaling. The first is that it helps to put your thoughts and feelings into concrete words. If you’re having troubles, writing them out helps define the problem, and defining the problem is the first (and most important) step in remedying it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve written myself out a bad place over the years (pssst: I’m trying it again now).
The second benefit is record keeping. A quote sometimes attributed to Mark Twain says “the past doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” When a problem or a situation shows up for a second or a third or a tenth time, it’s good to be able to look back, see how you thought and felt about it before, what you did then, and how well it worked.
The challenge is to make sure we see what’s the same and what’s changed. I rarely give financial advice, because things are so different now than when I was younger. For example, once I got out of college and started working a professional job, I got an apartment that was nice but hardly luxurious. The rent was 17% of my gross monthly income. I just did a quick search for similar apartments and estimates on starting salaries for industrial engineers. Today that same apartment would cost 26% of the gross salary of someone like I was then. Plus I didn’t have student loans, for a variety of reasons, most notably because state governments used to fund higher education at a significantly higher rate than they do now.
The point is that while experience can be very helpful, if you do the same thing now as you did 20 or 10 or even 5 years ago, you may not get the same results – because the game has changed.
And that brings us to the point of this post.
“Just keep moving” worked for a long time
My final regular post for last year was titled Just Keep Moving. It’s what I heard from the beginning of the pandemic from Cernunnos, from the Morrigan, and from all the other deities I honor and worship. And really, I’ve been hearing it since the beginning of Tower Time in 2016. Just keep moving. Keep working, keep doing spiritual practice, keep building relationships. Keep your head down, do what you can do and don’t worry about what you can’t do.
This was easy advice to follow. It’s how I got through a difficult childhood. Keep going to school, keep making good grades, keep a low profile, and keep visualizing going away to college. It’s how I got through my job from hell in the mid 1990s. And on a brighter note, it’s how I went from starting a blog to becoming a published author and someone who teaches at Pagan conferences.
“Just keep moving” is experience-based wisdom that has served me well throughout my life. That doesn’t mean it’s always going to be the right approach.
And I just realized I don’t think I’ve heard Anyone tell me “just keep moving” all year.
Some decisions have been made for us, regardless of what we think of them
“Keep your head down and don’t worry about the future” made sense in April 2020. We knew so little about the pandemic and we had no idea what changes it would bring. We had no idea how the U.S. election would go. And although you can argue we should have known the political changes that would be coming once regressive politicians realized the courts were no longer going to stop them from trampling the rights of anyone and everyone, most of us didn’t. I certainly didn’t.
In April 2022, it’s time to start making long-term plans again. The pandemic isn’t over, but the time for lockdowns and other societal restrictions is, at least in the West. China and some other Asian countries are still pursuing a “zero Covid” policy – they have levels of central control we simply don’t have in the West, particularly in the United States.
We can debate whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. We can debate whether we should keep masking indefinitely. But such debates are mostly irrelevant. For better or worse, our societal decisions have been made. The only question left is how each of us will assess and manage risks for ourselves.
To be clear, I do not argue that’s the right choice. But it is the choice, and so it’s what we have to deal with.
Remain an engaged citizen, but politics won’t save us
I’m going to do my best to elect progressive candidates in this year’s mid-term elections. And where I can’t, I’m going to do my best to elect moderates and less-worse Republicans. I hope I’m sitting here this time next year talking about progress with court reform, mass repeal of anti-choice and anti-trans laws, and an end to gerrymandering. I’m not giving up.
But I do not think that will be the case, and I no longer believe “wait and see” is the best approach.
Part of this is history. The party that controls the White House almost always loses seats in the mid-term elections. Joe Biden’s popularity is quite low right now – how much of that is his fault, how much is the fault of Manchin and Sinema, and how much is unreasonable expectations is another matter. I hope the horrible legislation coming out of Texas, Florida, and other red states will finally persuade moderates to get out and vote. But I’m not optimistic.
Besides, I need to do something now.
Free will, not fate
Fellow Denton Pagan and good friend Cynthia Talbot spoke at Denton UU on Sunday. In a very emotional sermon on choice, she said “when people have no choice, life is almost unbearable.” She’s right. One of the reasons I argue so strongly for free will vs. fate is that when we think we have a choice – whether we do or not – we’re more likely to do the kind of things that will make our lives better.
Seeing things going the wrong way is hard. Feeling like we have no way to correct them – at least not quickly – is even harder. But that doesn’t leave us with no choices. Our options may not be what we want them to be, but we have options.
As always, options and opportunities are not equally distributed. Those with more money, better health, and who are less directly impacted by regressive politics have more. Those with less money, worse health, and who are more directly impacted by regressive politics have fewer. But almost all of us have some options, some choice, some things we can do to make our lives better: safer, less stressful, more pleasant.
I cannot and will not tell you what you should do, lest I sound like one of those people who wonder why young folks don’t just go get a nice apartment for $340 a month like they did 40 years ago.
I will say that while every choice and every decision doesn’t haven to be made now, the time to wait and see is over.
Or at least it is for me.
How can you make things better for you and yours?
In the philosophical battle between optimism and pessimism, I consider myself a pragmatist. Hope for the best, plan for the worst, and expect something somewhere in the middle.
So I’m projecting where things are likely to go: politically, medically, socially. What’s the overall environment going to be like?
And then, what about personal things: my health, my paying job, my relationships, my local groups?
Now, given that this is all likely to be worse than I’d prefer, how do I want to respond?
How can I make things better for myself and my family, both my family of blood and my family of choice?
How do I want to live?
This requires meditation. And probably some divination. Working magic is easy, but figuring out what to work magic for is hard.
Then there are targets to set. Progressive workings to plan and execute. And perhaps most importantly, hypersigils to build. I’ve mostly managed to stop building the wrong hypersigil I wrote about last year, and one of the good ones I’ve been building for some time is still progressing nicely. But I need to rethink another one.
And I need to do it quickly.
Because I’m too old to wait and see. And even if I wasn’t, I’m in no mood to suffer any more and any longer than I have to.
Deal with things as they are
As always, I share these things because if I’m dealing with them, odds are good at least some of you are too. Perhaps my thought process will be helpful for you. Or at least, you’ll know you aren’t alone.
What I hope you get from all this is the need to take a cold, hard, honest look at where you are, where the world is, and where it’s going. While “a rising tide lifts all boats” is no substitute for an ethical fiscal policy, it’s generally true. But the opposite is also true: a falling tide lowers all boats.
You don’t have to like it, you just have to deal with it. So deal with it.
Before the falling tide crashes your boat on the rocks.
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