The quality I admire most in other people, which might also be the quality that could saves us
This is a long piece, about a gig (not just any gig though, you wait), and the way a conversation there with a stranger reminded me of the human quality we all desperately need right now
Last week I was as scared as I have ever been about the future. The present felt perilous, and drenched in blood. I watched the video of that shooting by accident. It’s replayed again and again and again in my mind. It’s there now. It was there when I pressed my head to a pillow, there when I woke up. And afterwards, when I could not unsee it, I stupidly looked for answers, and helplessly I tumbled down and down and down into a void of social media, watching clips of violence, and clips of violent rhetoric, some of it in America and some of it in England, until the images inside my head where like a tape, playing on a loop of horror, and my fingers tips were hurting from scrolling, and my thumb joints were swollen, from grasping my phone. It felt like a net closing: despair. And the rhetoric that’s followed that shooting has only added to a huge sense of despair, since it’s made me more aware of the sense of violent divisions which have riven through every part of society, and across the world in a way that feels irreversible.
Yet alongside this experience of existential futility, fanned by on-line and actual violence, something else happened to me, at a gig, on Sunday night, which was profound, and, for one evening at least, gave me a sense of a bigger picture, outside the news, which left me with a feeling of quiet hope. I’m trying to hold on to it.
And I also had a conversation with a total stranger - a middle aged man, I’d say late 50s, who’d almost certainly vote a very different way to me - which reminded me of the personality trait I admire most in other people, since he was displaying it, in spades. A personality trait we could ALL do with cultivating right now, all of us, if we are to find a way though this dark place.