An Inner Life for Ordinary Time
You know things have been crazy when the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas feels like a breather. And that free time I imagined opening up, which I mentioned a few weeks ago, either hasn’t showed up or did and I immediately filled it with other things. So it’s not as if I am just luxuriating my way through my days here. And corona virus hasn’t resolved itself, however encouraging the news of the vaccines may be. But I think it speaks to precisely how much the shared inner life of the republic was infected by the psychic architecture of our soon-but-not-soon-enough to be former president just how differently I and I suspect a lot of others feel.
I imagine we all know people whose lives seem to be lived from crisis to crisis, who seem to manufacture crises when they don’t readily present themselves and who probably experience situations as crises which for other people would not be. They are difficult to be around. Their needs are always greatest, and they have little space for yours. I have known a few who do manage to make space for the needs of others, sometimes going out of their way to do it, but have this way of injecting their chaos in such a manner that what was a problem turns into a crisis and somehow becomes theirs even more than yours, even though it was your issue in the first place.
I have my theories about what’s going on with these kinds of people, and they tend to revolve around an inability to negotiate the yawning abyss of meaninglessness that presents itself whenever they have a crisis-free moment, though I’m certain that much of it has to do with the experience of trauma and a good portion of it is related to addiction. Those aren’t mutually exclusive explanations.
The point is, the eventually-to-be-former president is almost certainly one of these people. He solved few enough problems, but of those he did solve, how many of them wouldn’t have been problems if he hadn’t made them so? Aside from the fact that he’s shown no ability for strategic thinking, which, needless to say, is absolutely essential for someone making the level of decision the president is responsible for—hell, any parent who saves money for their child’s education is a far greater strategic thinker than the current leader of the free world—and so has created massive problems globally and domestically that the country and the world will be digging itself out from under for decades, he’s also pulled nearly all of us into the anarchic gyre of his crisis-dependent psyche.
I think the biggest part of that breather I mentioned is simply the release from the pull of this diseased psyche that was afforded by the election, and even more importantly, the first few days after his dis-election, when everyone was holding their breath to find out whether he’d get enough people on board with his coup idea to make a go of it. But he’s acting differently these days, and the media is treating him differently, and many in his party are reacting differently, and it all adds up to a breather. Whatever his policies, our president-elect is not possessed of this kind of psyche. Anyone who thinks he is is projecting their own issues onto him, as happened with President Obama.
I make no predictions for the future, and I can already feel its challenges staking their claim, but I’m going to do my best to shake free of the chaos I’ve internalized over the last five years and recreate an inner life for ordinary time. And, of course, see how that affects the lectures.
