Get Caught

Say people are fish. I have observed, coming from a medium sized pond, Seattle, that peers from my past seem to still be living in a world made solely up of other fish. They have been pursuing lives of privilege, and when I observe this, it is in people that I know that come from privilege, as did I. Even in my small community, there seem to be the fish of my peers, and sometimes in this very small pond, fish can end up identifying with a size that they know not is relatively small. Whether you are a medium sized fish from Seattle, living in the huge lake of New York City, or a small fish from Lopez living in the slightly larger pond of Bellingham or the medium lake of Portland, OR, size still seems to be what it is all about.

I feel saddened when I get this feeling from shadows of my past. What I observe is a nature that is very much unchanged from when I knew these people 20 plus years ago. How is it possible that a person can move through life for decades, appearing to change. They raise families, they have parents die, they graduate college and start their lives. Yet what I see and observe is a lack of change, and this feels like pain. Is this the goal, to keep your youthful body? To go on unchanged? To maintain connections from your high school class? I fear I am not very attractive to re-kindle relations with for many of these people, and maybe it is because I am so vocal about having mental illness.

But one thing I have done is change. I have failed, I have died, I have raged, I have cried. I have evolved. And what of my privilege? My very privileged peers sometimes seem to still be unaware of their privilege. One may be educated and very liberal, but have they realized that every step along the way was fueled by their privilege? Have we conceived of the fact that maybe everything that we have gained would not be ours if we had attended public school, been raised in poverty, and were also a person of color? If one was an immigrant or illegal, or a refugee? Or do you just sit at your spot in Paris sipping your coffee wondering how to commiserate with your peers who are also balancing this precipitous ledge?

I imagine that my wealthy peers, from Seattle Prep, from Northwest School, from Mills college, are being challenged to conceive of privilege these days with the climate of school shootings and Black Lives Matter. Maybe even Climate Change. I know the intelligent minds of my peers are capable of thinking. But are they able to look at their pain? I know that the jail bars of privilege are also very painful. Even if the fish does not get caught by the hook, it suffers.

The answer, the only answer, remains to be a spiritual life. And it must be a spiritual life that evokes inner change and true evolution. There are many ways to act out the walking and the talking without truly engaging, because again, engaging with our fears, our inner selves, our hidden pain, grief, and anger, takes slowing down. It takes a change in perception where we lose track of the other fish in the pond, lake, whatever, and we completely stop measuring our existence based upon the other fish in our school or neighboring school. Transformation is the only thing that is going to change the trajectory of our very ill culture and planet in crises. But if you are maintaining your privilege, white or otherwise, you are preventing this much needed inner and communal evolution. We all have pain. Those at the bottom wear their pain on their sleeves, or cannot hide it, it seems. But for those on the top, in the middle, or tucked away in a smaller pond all together, the pain is very real as well. Sometimes it proves to be harder to find, because on the outside, what has been achieved or is being maintained is relatively impressive. It is strange that true awareness comes from getting lost in a way. It comes from trust, from healing, and from pursuing a humble and rational existence. But how do you find what is rational when you feel that you need to follow that fish, be that fish, and not get caught? Perhaps what we are avoiding is what we truly need.