If I was focused on the insanity around me, I would be sleepless, anxious, and quite rightly, unhinged. Some say I’m already that last one so I’m guessing I haven’t far to go to get there, wherever there is. Good thing there is no there, only here and the idea, the thought, the belief in somewhere that isn’t here.

At times the focus here pokes around in the insanity, checking to see how crazy it’s gotten Is it just normal insanity, bloody bonkers insanity, or has it reached the point of evil, hellfire and brimstone, end of the world type insanity?

On any given day it could be all three. In the morning it might be close to our new normal scale but by dinner we could be looking at the end of the world. Funny. Next morning we’re back to a bag of normal insanity and ready to do it all over again.

Not that this can’t or won’t go hellishly hot in a snap, it could. It even might. Hell, we could be there already.

If there is a hell, this is it buckeroo.

The question I ask myself is what am I going to do about it? Can I stop the aircraft carrier from doing what it’s going to do? Can I twitch my nose and bring back the rich history of the East Wing? Can I magically inform my neighbors, friends and family and flip a switch so they see the light, see the harm, see what’s coming, not just for me, but for them as well?

Does anxiety serve me or serve my world?

No doubt about it, we are living through desperate times. Many of us will not survive to see the end of this road. People will suffer and those who have been conned see that as a price they are willing to pay — as long as they don’t have to pay it. These are the facts of our now here, our not then there. It is here now in our faces. We breathe it in, walk through it, go to sleep in it. There is no escaping the energy of insanity.

So what do we do with that?

If I could I would eliminate hope altogether but that might be too big a shock to the system for some. Hope resides in the then there, somewhere that isn’t a where, isn’t even now. It is a layer of mental comfort we wrap ourselves in to keep from experiencing what is here now.

Some of us need it. Desperately or mildly, it doesn’t really matter. Some of us are growing out of that need. We need it until we need it no longer.

Hanging onto hope, we bar the door (of course, there isn’t a door) to the here now. We cut ourselves off from the power that heals, that enlivens, that frees us from anxiety and fear. We stop ourselves from realizing what we are, what this is.

Letting it go, standing in the middle of what is, fully willing to be without hope, is freeing in ways that I can only point to. Yeah, I know. It doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. If we could figure it out, make it make sense, it wouldn’t be This. That recognition allows us to be here with life as it is without the requisite anxiety, without becoming unhinged.

The fear, or one of them, is that letting go, being here now, releasing the fight, means that life gets stuck in a Groundhog Day look where nothing changes, where the bad guys win, where suffering and pain are taken as normal.

Life is change. Nothing stays the same. Suffocating the fear, taking the air out of the need to change it, not fanning the flames of anger about what is happening, doesn’t infuse it with power. It starves it. Giving it no attention, steals its spark.

Left to itself, life straightens out the crookedness, exposing the corruption within it, revealing harmonious possibilities, but it feels counter-intuitive to do nothing, to let go, to stop fighting against … so we don’t and in our thirst for justice we create more injustice; we add more fuel to the fire; we foster the conditions for the fire to burn out of control.

Perhaps it’s time to stick our toes in the deep end, to allow ourselves to feel even just a bit of what’s here. To place hope in a box and a key in the lock. If we don’t like it, or we need a little breather, we can always turn the key and let hope back out. But just maybe we will find something worth the seemingly heavy price of giving up hope. We can’t know until we experiment a bit.

Life is all experiment. It’s just a matter of what we focus on, what we choose to experiment with, what our experiences have shown us so far and prepared us to admit is possible.

image: Hopelessness, AI WordPress by Amaya

Amaya Gayle is the author of 6 books, the latest Actuality; infinity at play, published by New Saram Press. https://amzn.to/3Rd4CTY