An Autumn day like this demands a two-wheeled response. So I ride through it. One of those days that serves up unanticipated perfection. One of those days that leaves a pleasant inscription in your memory that you might try to recapture (by doing the same activities or going to the same place) but inevitably fail by the forcing of it.

I sit by the lake pulling at a stale croissant and sipping bitter-bad coffee…..and it is still perfect. 

For a time I people watch.
Then.
The drone of some sort of military plane cuts the soundless blue sky. Coming in on a low, slow turn, before birthing a bunch of skydivers right above me. They pop smoke and drop large flags below them indicating that the show is an army promotion. 

Like everyone else, I pull out my phone to grab the moment on glass.

The excitement settles. In no hurry to move on, I pull my Kindle out of my pack and slow read my way into the climate emergency. 

Perhaps it was because we were so sociopathically good at collating bad news into a sickening evolving sense of what constituted “normal,” or because we looked outside and things seemed still okay. Because we were bored with writing, or reading, the same story again and again, because climate was so global and therefore nontribal it suggested only the corniest politics, because we didn’t yet appreciate how fully it would ravage our lives, and because, selfishly, we didn’t mind destroying the planet for others living elsewhere on it or those not yet born who would inherit it from us, outraged.

—David Wallace Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

As you may have noticed, I am struggling with my responses to the overwhelming realisation of the badness now unfolding with increasing speed.

How to respond? How to ride into it on two wheels without becoming just another beige merchant of doom, or without dismissing the micro perfections, like today, that are still on offer?

The book I am reading (now open before me at chapter 2) attempts to address such eco-anxiety. Suggesting that it is time to lean into it all….fiercly undaunted. The author unpacks undaunted as a simple call to live “not intimidated or discouraged by difficulty, danger, or disappointment”.

Before anything different can happen, before people can sense, hear, relate, and imagine differently, there must be a clearing, a decluttering, an initiation into the unknowable; and a letting go of the desires for certainty, authority, hierarchy, and of insatiable consumption as a mode of relating to everything. We will need a genuine severance that will shatter all projections, anticipations, hopes, and expectations in order to find something we lost about ourselves, about time/space, about the depth of the shit we are in, about the medicines/poisons we carry. This is about pain, about death, about finding a compass, an antidote to separability. This is about being ready to go—to befriend death—before we are ready to return home and to live as grown-ups.

— Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism

FYI the book I am reading is called: Undaunted: Living Fiercely into Climate Meltdown in an Authoritarian World, by Carolyn Baker.