2 days ago
- General
- Winnipeg Free Press
Holding out hope
Not knowing how everything is going to turn out is a crucial component to facing existential challenges and navigating change, according to Rebecca Solnit, acclaimed essayist and award-winning author of more than 20 books including the groundbreaking work Men Explain Things to Me.
'The state of unknowing is both normal and so wildly uncomfortable that we engage in foolish and delusional imitations of knowing,' she writes in her latest collection No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain.
The urge to hold on to 'delusional imitations of knowing' is at the crux of some of the world's greatest problems, resulting in inaction — or worse, the wrong action, Solnit argues. Further, social media allows people with only a limited understanding of certain issue to become 'would-be pundits and false prophets,' encouraging those without all the facts to make summary judgements.
In an essay entitled Tortoise at the Mayfly Party, Solnit makes the case for taking the long view instead of trite, summary judgments. Before throwing up our hands and proclaiming that feminism has failed because there's a current roadblock in the onward march toward equality, or that the race to thwart climate catastrophe is lost because of current inaction, she suggests an alternative: remember the oak tree was once an acorn. In other words, don't give up. Keep pressing forward and refuse to be lulled into despondent complacency.
Solnit urges her readers to remember a time when there was something better than chaos and decline. As an advocate who has been on the frontlines of the global climate crisis and the fight for women's rights for several years, she rails against those who have been lulled into inaction. Don't choose 'grim certainty' over the uncertainty of what else might happen next, she pleads. 'If you pretend the future is preordained, you don't have to do anything.'
The book then becomes a meditation in favour of certain progress while offering a roadmap. Yet none of it is easy; all of it demands a reappraisal of the current status quo.
For example, as another summer sky fills with wildfire smoke, an essay aptly entitled Sky Full of Forests becomes a call to action against forgetting. 'Memory of how we slipped into trouble and misery and what came before can help us journey out of it,' she writes.
It becomes a plea for reversing the damage of fossil fuels through a peace offering with nature.
She also takes aim at an 'ideology of isolation,' describing it as a flawed and fundamental tenet of modern right-wing worldviews. This ideology, she argues, offers people a way to believe their individual actions (or inactions) are disconnected from the larger whole. For example, refusing to prevent the spread of illness by wearing a face mask and not curbing behaviour to mitigate climate change are actions in opposite of an interconnected world.
'Isolationists and interconnectionists might be more useful terms for the political divides of our time than left and right,' she writes.
Inseparability is the pathway forward, a mantra that we truly are all in this together. In caring for each other's well-being, we are caring for our own.
At its core, No Straight Road Takes You There is an invitation to remember a time when things were vastly different from now, and begin telling a new story of how vastly better things will be within a caring, interconnected society.
Rochelle Squires is an avid book reader who is no longer uncomfortable with uneven terrain.
