Agency.

Awakening waking from a dream every once and awhile there is a glimpse of a higher sense of self behind the curtain  of my ever-so-flawed daily life. Getting to the level of sleep needed to make the higher self connection and then carrying back observations or knowledge into waking reality is what is important and needed but this task is the tricky part.

If you are  striving for “mindfulness” via meditation or yoga or any of the other currently popular practices designed to connect your mind with this higher sense of self, I applaud your diligence. Reaching for knowledge delivered from my higher self is a longing which has been present since my twenties, but I have a rebellious streak that chafes at doing what is recommended (sticking to that daily consistency of practice) especially when I perceive the practice to be trendy. I mean no offense to those of you disciplined in ways I am not. This confession is only a self-defense mechanism; I’ve always been attracted to swimming upstream or standing on the sidelines serving as an observer rather than a practitioner. My glimpses or intuitions come, but not out of disciplined practice, but arrive instead in an ad hoc kind of way.

Because I love words, I often am aware of new ways they are pronounced or used. Lately the word “agency”  has been popping up regularly in print, or on social and broadcast media. This “agency” is not the one describing a local agricultural organization or the name of a business where you go to purchase insurance or a governmental department on the chopping block. The new use as described in Wikipedia:

“…agency is defined as the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices. By contrast, structure are those factors of influence (such as social class, religion, gender, ethnicity, ability, customs, etc.) that determine or limit an agent and their decisions.”

My higher sense of self popping out from my dream cloud has “agency”. My daily, waking self seemingly floats in a steam of anything but. Do you feel a sense of agency filling your life? If I were to begin to meditate daily would this bring me a sense of agency ?. Do I have agency getting contactless grocery deliveries or pickups? What is the connection with this use of agency  in the midst of year one of a global pandemic when divisional politics have shredded our sense of common purpose? When we violently split over the legitimacy and legality of a presidential election? Timing is everything. This word’s new use is a clue.

I believe we want to think that we have agency in our lives whereas the truth is we float along in the stream that is our daily existence wanting to believe we have choices, that we are in “control”. It is my hope that agency  is my higher self, manifesting a sorely needed idea translated out of my dream state rather than out a sense of my deeply rooted cynicism which suggests the current use of the word comes at a time in which a sense of personal agency is far from reality. The challenge—the longing—is that agency  is a message from our collective higher selves, in hopes that we will absorb it into our daily consciousness at a time when we seem to have lost so much. This morphed use of the word may be a clue of where we need to be rather than where we currently are. That would be as close to agency as we could get.

Living History.

A number of years ago I became drawn to the history of the UK during the World War II era. My attraction was not to the stories of war and heroism, or to battles, or to studying the actions of world leaders during that time. Instead, I wanted to know the stories of the ordinary, daily, lives of the people trying to make it through those wars years, 1939 to 1946 or a bit after. Long before a hint of a pandemic future, my interest in this period stayed strong and I, who have never stepped foot in the UK, got sucked in by the remarkable number of surprisingly good books and films that cover so many aspects of this time. My latest is a binge watch of a BBC docu-series first broadcast in 2012 called “Wartime Farm” in which an historian and two archaeologists filmed a year long re-creation of the Britain’s “other” war, the one concerned with keeping Hitler’s forces from using starvation as a weapon to overtake the UK as they had done in so many other European countries. Tractors, chickens, dairy cows, flax and wheat, making do, using everything at hand, and all aspects of life, including attitudes,  were “weaponized” to keep Great Britain out of German control. What a tale.

Is it ever possible to truly understand an historical period not of our own experience? More than one biopic has sent me scurrying to thick biographies as a check or challenge to what’s been shown by the life depicted on screen, but all such endeavors are found to be lacking, full of inaccuracies of one form or another. Questions always remain.

This day-to-day slow crawl of a worldwide pandemic is history in the making as are the parallel, ongoing, worldwide political upheavals. I am continually struck by how our individual experiences vary wildly even when we attempt to reassure one another that we are all “in this together”. Since the pandemic enfolded the experience of those with jobs (i.e., paychecks) could not equal those who have lost their livelihoods or their businesses. Those among us who have contracted the virus, or have loved ones who have become ill or who died, are in a different boat from those of us staying sharply isolated, afraid, and remaining physically safe but possibly losing our mental grip.

A question for all times: how do we see our own lives in historical context even as we are living through it?

I have talked (socially distanced via Zoom) with a variety of people who declare that they have not been all that affected by this pandemic, people who have in one way or another still traveled, still retained close family contact. I find myself wondering about optimism or the opposite, falling down into dark rabbit holes. And what about so many of us who are experiencing bits of both at the same time? Despite our perceived commonalities, a car ride through neighboring communities already gives evidence of sharp change—closed businesses, ubiquitous masking, “For Sale” signs popping up on homes and pasted on to darkened empty windows, the residents or owners or proprietors already gone. When we can again roam freely, we will be stunned by the changes to places we hold dear in our hearts? There will not be a return to “normal”, only an arrival at a new normal, one we create as we move along. Our constant flying blindly into the blank state of the unknown then somehow emerging and trying to piece together what happened is our history.

Recently I took a class on historical pandemics wanting a glimpse of what previous humans suffered in the various forms of past plagues of plagues and epidemics. What did they know and how they were affected? It appears that Black Death survivors in the 1300’s, without knowledge of “virus” made common sense observations which some used to stay isolated and alive. Yet during this Coronavirus pandemic segments of current humanity, those with access to all manner of understanding of disease process, chose to ignore science and rely on their own opinion of what was “real”. Some of them became ill or died, but not all, at least not yet. Did we humans make progress only to yet again fall back into superstition and ignorance?

The more I try for even a narrow glimpse of truth through peepholes into the past, the more I am humbled at the vastness of the task. I feel like an ant trying to understand the magnitude of galaxies. My personal current history is a slow crawl of one day blending into the next, of isolation filled with questions, of not one iota of progress as the clouds and sun come and go in rhythms I also do not thoroughly understand. On second thought, that ant may be be far better equipped for the struggle than I who remains baffled.