Let’s consider for a moment the idea that creation and destruction, hate and love are not opposites, they are the same. Contrasting sides to the same coin, one implicitly holding the fact of the other.
It gives us a beautiful way forward through the things we are resisting, if we see that the things we want to change hold the absolute truth of the things we want to create.
I love being with people who are angry, who are taking huge grief and spinning it into wild destruction, either outwardly or within their own lives, because I see so clearly the bedrock of love and connection that is witnessed through the destruction.
They could not be as they are without the seeds of huge passion, huge love, huge hope, even. Somewhere in their anguished attempts to hurt and revenge is a vision of something entirely different, entirely opposite. They see the possibility of wild, enormous love, and ache at its apparent absence in their lives and in the world.
These are the people we can learn from.
It is numbness that saddens me, the world of small lives, where imagination is stifled in favour of conformity, where people are taught to toe the line, as if a row of identical workers could create the world we see as possible. They can’t. At best, they can keep us on our current trajectory, wherever that may lead.
My vision is to listen to the impassioned, to admire them, love them, hear what they have to say. We may need to wait through some ranting, some fearful scenarios, some recounting of woeful wrongs; and these we can learn from, also, if we’re truly listening for the nuggets of gold that pepper the diatribe.
My experience is that once people who haven’t felt heard feel heard; once those who haven’t felt respected feel respected, once they experience someone who can stay with them, accept them, love them, something alters – their ideas shift and come to the forefront; their anger becomes possibility and love, and something totally new opens up in front of them, something that will benefit us all.
Let’s play with the idea that passion is good, always, that it just needs channeling to become something wonderful, beautiful and new.
It may be that the coin needs flipping, but really, how hard is it to flip a coin?