Getting old is a slow process of reduction and contraction, and if you’re not careful you lose track of the things you’re slowly losing track of, until you can’t think outside of well-worn grooves and don’t even perceive that these habits of thought are idiosyncratic and contingent. Interesting weekend on the emotional/psychic rollercoaster. Friday we had a couple couples over for dinner: J——- and J—-, a young couple (early 20s) of folks who moved here hoping to start farming; and K——- and J–, an older couple (50s) of people who’ve lived here for some time. The conversation was very much about the real estate market and about the whole gamut of troubling topics: peak oil, climate freakout, growing food for survival, etc. It all left me feeling sort of scattered and bummed out. The tone of the evening was very much about fear and preparation for disaster and about feeling overwhelmed by vast conspiratorial forces arrayed against us, like the armies of orcs massed against the forces of good in Lord of the Rings. That stance of brave holdout in a noble lost cause is a very tempting pitfall for activists and those who feel that they are in the vanguard of social change (the avant-garde).

Then yesterday I attended an intergenerational conference hosted by the local youth group. A whole day of trust-building exercises, workshops, and just being together. It was great. It pushed my touchy-feely boundaries, which is probably a good thing. Man, the young people in this town are so sweet. They all know each other, and mostly they’re very happy and full of positive energy and hope. It makes me feel a bit sad that some of them are going to get that youthful spirit crushed out of them if they don’t watch out.

But the moral of the story is that it’s better to go nowhere with the positive thinkers than to plan plan plan with the fearful and security-obsessed older people. The youth event was just about trying to become more trusting and to reconnect on the personal level, and I am starting to feel (not in my head, but in my gut) that reconnecting and just trying to be more authentically present for each other is a million times more of a revolutionary act (and way harder to do) than building some kind of political or social alternative to present broken systems of social organization. Feels more and more like getting dragged into the adversarial stance is a sucker’s game. “Only connect,” as E.M. Forster said. It’s hard!