Like fish in water: Talking to loved ones in times like these
It's been a tough week.
Clarence and the gang have taken us back in time, the January 6th hearings (aka "the thing we all saw with our own eyes"), call for recalibrating yet again Trump's shaky claims to sanity and virtue, and the crypto markets are, well, going through the most. All this, and I have not been getting my 8 hours.
From this place of heaviness, inner turmoil and sleep deprivation, I’ve found myself embroiled in a series of difficult conversations with friends and family.
Consider my chipper Friday morning chat with my mother in which she called me, among other things, a “sheep” and “a fish that doesn’t know it is surrounded by water”.
My family and I disagree on many things. Thankfully, our home has always adhered to a certain diplomacy that prevails despite us living on opposite ends of the world.
So, when my 8 am call to South Africa turned to the topic of abortion laws (what a way to kickstart your day, huh?) we found ourselves once more digging our heels in. But unlike other issues – should we get vaccinated? will Muslims go to heaven? – this one offered less room for ideological compromise.
The prevailing sentiment, as captured in the above Instagram post, seems to be that there can be no discussion. How do you find commonality when the other side believes that doing so goes against their core moral principles? If abortion is simply murder, then where is the middle ground?
Our public discourse feels futile because we argue from disparate worldviews. On the one hand are appeals to absolute, unquestionable religious truths and on the other, a battlecry against the alarming encroachment of self-determination.
And so we have a deadlock. Respect our loved ones as we must, when their views manifest in law and lived experience, to simply walk away and agree to disagree feels insufficient. In my experience, the only diplomatic conclusion to my conversations with my mother are:
Me: “I respect your views because I love you.”
Mom: “I will pray for you because I love you.”
Perhaps it is this love to which we must return. The reason I am willing to have difficult conversations with my family on abortion and gay marriage at 8 am on a Friday morning is because I love them. The reason I inwardly smile when my mother tells me she thinks I’m a sheep is because I know she does so from a place of genuine care (and to be honest, being reminded to question one’s echo chamber is never a bad thing – so thanks Mom, just be sure to do the same 😉).
And yet… having experienced familial diplomacy all my life, where we show no inability to listen to each other and love each other nonetheless (thank God!) I can’t help thinking, “Well, what now?”
Being nice doesn’t change reality. Women in America no longer have bodily autonomy. Gangsterism is the political rule of the day. There is a long and difficult fight ahead.
Nevertheless
To love and listen in times like these is to grope in the dark towards some unknown future, holding on to the battered yet ever-present belief that we cannot get to that place alone.
The differences we navigate with the people we love are not “debates” about “issues”. Tempting as it is, we cannot reduce our discourse entirely to the realm of knowledge, that “infinite indifference” Kierkegaard warned of so often.
For me, the past few days have been a sobering reminder to reorient my intention going into these conversations. Yes, matters of life, death, love and justice are battles to be won. But they are also questions which call for our continuous response. And in this ongoing response-making, to which we really are compelled lest we descend into hypocrisy, we find ourselves bound to the other. We are all fish in water.
I don’t know what the path forward is, but someone recently offered this comforting truth: empathy expands possibilities.
And when words and ideas fail us, there is always poetry:
The Thing Is (Ellen Bass)
to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you down like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.
