Finding Ground
Five Existential Questions for a Breaking-Open World
It was just after three o’clock in the morning, and like the previous two nights, I had slept deeply for several hours in spite of unsettling dreams yet now I was awake. After months of sleeping soundly through the night, it seemed that a new pattern was emerging—one I have known before, yet not for a while. And several days later, the pattern has persisted. Yet it’s not the same as previous sleepless cycles. This one is not so much rooted in uncertainty or fear or doubt. It’s coming from a deep feeling of being unmoored, untethered. From life, from my identity, from reality itself, all of which feels incredibly “unreal” right now. And in that middle-of-the-night liminal space, I couldn’t seem to connect with who I am, why I’m here, or where I’m going.
Yet on the third night, I began to recognize that the feeling of being unmoored and untethered didn’t actually belong to me; it was a condition of the collective—of the mass consciousness. However, what was mine was that I had allowed myself to be swept up in the undercurrent fears and anxieties that right now are ever-present in the air we breathe. They’re underneath our thoughts and feelings; they’re impacting how we move and the choices we make as we navigate our daily lives.
And at the same time, even in that middle-of-the-night liminal space, I felt that summons from my soul that I wrote about last week. The summons to Choice. I’ve been saying “yes” to that summons for a month now, yet its persistence tells me there is still more to discover.
That night, I realized that the summons was asking me to choose whether I would reconnect and stand in who, in fact, I do know myself to be. To choose whether I would claim what is mine to bring to the world. Or would I instead allow myself to be swept up in the anxieties and emotions of the collective?
Another wake-up call.
An even more powerful
summons from the heart of my being.
A call to recognize and name what I sense in the world right now. To recognize and name what I read in the collective consciousness and its undercurrent of fear and anxiety.
There are, even now, extraordinary people, communities, thinkers, organizers, healers, scientists, educators, and emerging young leaders who are imagining and building differently. Yet their stories are rarely, if ever, amplified in the mass media. Our media systems are currently more designed to feed the collective’s increasing addiction to conflict and spectacle. Which leaves us with no coherent collective story to orient us together.
Lying in bed that third night, there were so many “un” words flooding my awareness—unmoored, untethered, unfastened, unhooked, unknown, unknowing, unfathomed, unlocked, unhinged, unsettled, uncertain, unwise, unsustainable, undefined, undirected, unsure… They all felt like apt descriptors of our times, and you can probably add to the list.
The prefix “un” usually means “not.” And that night I had the feeling that, right now, we are living in a world that is “not” much more than a world that “is.”
And then I came to two more words beginning with “un”—
understand and understood.
Which led me to wonder:
What is underneath where we stand?
What was underneath where we stood before?
And what do we choose to stand on going forward?
What do we choose to make sure is underneath our future?
As the liminal space gave way to clearer sensing and feeling, I came back to five long-view existential questions. Questions that I realized I hadn’t been able to answer for the larger collective for months. It felt like we as a collective had completely lost touch with these questions and all they stood for.
1) Who are we?
2) Why are we here?
3) Where are we going?
4) What are we doing?
5) For what purpose?
That night, the only one of those questions for which I could find a relatively definitive answer was the second one: Why are we here?
At the most fundamental level, I believe we are here to learn. More specifically, to learn to live love. Yet in that liminal space, the idea of living love or being able to answer the rest of the questions felt impossibly remote.
In the darkest moments of that night, I wondered if I, too, on a personal level, had unconsciously lost touch with those questions.
1) Who am I?
2) Why am I here?
3) Where am I going?
4) What am I doing?
5) For what purpose?
Nothing is permanent. Nothing is fixed, immoveable. Yet there can be stability in movement, stability in change. Across human history, there have been cycles of stabilizing, creating, strengthening, and lifting up who we are as individuals and as collectives, even in times of major change. And there have been cycles of breaking down and breaking open.
Currently, we’re in a cycle of breaking open. And while the obvious breaking open is of societal and cultural infrastructures and systems and social contracts, it seems to me that all of that is a metaphor for the less obvious breaking open of the human spirit.
When societal systems and structures and social contracts break open, we can choose to stay present with what is happening long enough to sense and name the truths in what is being revealed. And if we stay present even longer, we might get as far as acknowledging more honestly how we are showing up and whether that is who we want to be together. We might even find a more coherent sense of what really matters.
Yet the breaking open can be a double-edged sword. Because it also carries the danger of instability on every level. And right now, our individual and collective nervous systems have no place to land. Attention itself is becoming unmoored.
As the darkness of that third night slowly turned to dawn, I returned to my summons: Choice. And I recognized that even though my answer to the question Why are we here? felt very broad—to learn and to live love—that broad directive became my grounding point. And it became my first step in re-opening the door back to myself.
In that moment, “learning” felt more like a direction than an action. Undefined and ever evolving, what I’m learning keeps opening and expanding. Yet when I ground it all in the context of love and living love, my breath settles and deepens. I feel steadier. I reconnect with myself again. My capacity for discernment is revitalized. I reconnect with what is still fundamentally human beneath the acceleration and fragmentation in today’s world.
Which allows me to rest once more in my summons to Choice.
To choose where I put my focus.
Do I focus on the rapid disorientation of the human spirit,
or do I focus on the process of finding orientation again?
Finding one another.
Finding what truly matters
to the soul of humanity.
Focusing on that choice brings me back to the truth that I do, in fact, know how to answer all five of those questions for myself. And perhaps you do, too. Yet if you are feeling untethered right now, perhaps the summons to Choice isn’t only for me. We can choose to stand in what grounds us. We can choose to remain connected with our humanity.
As individuals and as a collective, we may have lost our way. Yet there is a pathway to bring us back to a coherent vision and engagement. It’s time.
Who am I? Who are we?
Why am I here? Why are we here?
Where am I going? Where are we going?
What am I doing? What are we doing?
And for what purpose?
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Thank you, Alan, for listening to the summons to choose. Thank you for your questions and for your grounding point "to learn and to live love". And thank you for sharing your "wake up call" which has become an invitation to all of us.
Beautiful, Alan. I think many people simply treat the collective's angst as white noise, and don't recognize how it infiltrates our own consciousness. Waking up to that and making the choice as an individual to orient helps the collective begin to return to earth, too.