The national condition of feeling stuck

Everything feels stuck.

Every post on my feeds is “hoping for the best, but…” “I didn’t know what to do, so I just…” “well, nothing’s going to make a difference, so…”

I sense the stuckness in the street, I sense the stuckness at work, I am pounded over the head with the stuckness over social media and I am overwhelmed with the attempts to deepen it in the media.

Of course, I am suffering from the stuckness in my own soul.

People around me are stuck in their personal lives. Family or career. Where to live. How to live healthily. How to get along with aging parents or teenage kids. To propose? To have another kid? To leave a job? To go back to school? To go into debt? To get out of debt?

Making choices is hard. Not to be confused with deciding. Choosing is actively committing to something, actively seeking out an option, embracing your condition, even when there is nothing else to choose from. As opposed to deciding. Knowing that when you choose an option, you are bringing it into yourself, risking being wrong about it, risking it being painful, risking looking bad, but throwing your will and weight behind something with support and hope and want.

This election feels like deciding on an option, not choosing one. That one point seems to be the sole state of our ‘national unity’.

But in our personal lives – if we’re not actively making choices and backing what we truly want, with all the risks that comes with, then we’ve really given in to the stuckness. And how can we pull together for a better national condition if on the day-to-day we are all, individually, stuck?


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