The virtue of darkness is to face reality at its harshest without looking away.
There are many forms of darkness, but perhaps the most primal is to not know things.
Humans crave certainty.
Is there a lion lurking in the shadows or not? Will your family abandon you or not? Will your parents or government or God somehow make sure that everything will ultimately be okay?
And sometimes the answer is no, you’re on your own and that’s awful.
But… at least you know where you stand.
Sometimes though the answer is just “I don’t know”.
And you have to make a decision and take action without knowing. And you might have to make trade-offs or sacrifices. And you won’t find out tomorrow or next week or even a year from now whether those sacrifices were worth it.
This year there were a lot of things I didn’t know.
Some of them were concrete and easy to think about. How easily does COVID spread? How likely am I to die or suffer long-term debilitating effects? Do masks work? What distances can we safely see each other outdoors?
Back in April the answer to most of these was “we don’t know yet”. And we had to make calls about what to do, regardless, and nine months later some of the answers still aren’t quite as clear as I would like.
But those were the straightforward questions.
Some questions got murkier, questions about what other people believe, questions about game theory and moral uncertainty and how to handle scarcity.
And I didn’t know the answers, and I didn’t know what other people thought the answers were.
How dangerous do other people think that COVID is? What norms do they think there should be in a pandemic and how do they think we should enforce those norms?
I don’t know.
What crumbling pillars of my life do I need to survive? Which pillars do my loved ones need?
If my spouse or housemate or friends or coworkers disagree about how to coordinate, what happens?
I don’t know.
How do I feel about that?
I’m not sure.
If I say “screw it, I’m sick of living in fear, I’m just going to live my life normally”, how likely am I to give COVID to someone else?
If I decide “screw it, I’m sick of negotiating with everyone, I’m running away to the woods”, what pieces of infrastructure will crumble a little bit in my absence?
Which friends needed me?
How many other people will run away into the woods, and what will we leave behind?
I don’t know.
If I’m overwhelmed and alone and don’t have the skills to do the right thing, which mistakes can I get away with making?
If a friend is overwhelmed and alone and they hurt me, how do I feel about that?
If I hurt a friend because I thought carefully and soberly through the trade-offs and wrung my hands, but ultimately decided they were on the wrong side of a trolley problem, how do I feel about that?
I don’t know.
It’s the end of the year, and here we are.
And it’s a reasonable time to want to make sense of things, to put the year in perspective, to ask “which sacrifices were worth it”?
And it’s a reasonable time to want to remind ourselves that we’re all on the same team and put the year behind us.
And ultimately I do think we’re all on the same team, and I have guesses about which sacrifices were worth it and which were not, but the fact is I’m not nearly confident about any of that to justify giving it in a Solstice speech.
And it’s a complicated question to ask,
what does it mean for us to all be on the same team if we have different needs and values and beliefs about what the right thing to do is?
I hurt people this year.
And I don’t know yet, which of those were mistakes and which of them were the least bad choice I could find at the time, and which of them were actually just the right decision, and I’m sorry.
I know other people who hurt each other, and who were quietly abandoned.
And the question looms, how do we make sense of all of that and find meaning, and be a community, and I wanted to have an answer for you guys tonight and I thought about it really hard and I tried.
But I don’t know
Yet.
This isn’t a tribe about getting to confidently know things together.
This is a tribe about figuring things out.
Sometimes we need to walk through the darkness a while. Neither entirely alone, but not entirely together.
With miles to go before morning.
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